Battle Fatigue

Joel Bloom doesn’t want to kill Vietnamese people. And given his upbringing, this comes as a surprise to him.

Born on the 7th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, he has grown up during the 1960s, a time when the after-effects of WWII are still tangible, even as the Cold War starts to unfold. His dad served in the Pacific but won’t talk about it. His uncle served in Europe and will talk only of place names and what he had to drink; never how he helped capture a place called Dachau. Wearing the combat fatigues and brandishing the real trophies their fathers brought back, Joel and his gang of friends play war games, in which the Japanese always surrender; and the Germans always die. Only Rocco never joins in. He has lost his father in something known euphemistically as ‘the Korean conflict’.

In their home town of Haley, Massachusetts; itself named after a veteran of an earlier ‘conflict’, boys it seems, always go to war. As Joel enters adolescence, the outside world is brewing yet another ‘conflict’ in a far-away country called Vietnam. It’s time for his generation to take its turn to fight. But fighting is something that Joel does not want to do.

Mark Kurlansky is the author of some terrific narrative histories for adults: among them Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. Battle Fatigue is his first book for young adults; and perhaps not surprisingly given his track record, Kurlansky is very successful in evoking a tense small-town microcosm of a world in turmoil. Less clearly explained are Joel’s own motivations for refusing to go to war. He confides occasionally in a diary but this device is used only sporadically, and somewhat clunkily; and so we never really get fully inside Joel’s head, despite the fact that the entire book is told in the first person. There is also little discernible development in his narrative voice between the ages of 11 and 18, a fact that did jar with this reader. For these reasons, Battle Fatigue is best read as a vivid introduction to a turbulent period of 20th-century history, rather than as a psychological defence of a draft-dodger.