NEW YORK -- Evidently prompted by the war in Afghanistan, John Gregory Dunne has discussed three books in The New York Review of Books (Dec. 20) to remind us of the savaging process that is war. For Dunne, whose sensitivity to anything false matches that of his wife, Joan Didion, who called "The Greatest Generation" -- the most fashionable historical branding in America today -- a "treacly concoction" and who described the "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech that Peggy Noonan wrote for Ronald Reagan for the 40th anniversary of Omaha Beach as "sentimental claptrap."
The books Dunne has chosen are "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa," by E. B. Sledge (1981); "The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb," by George Feifer (1992); and "The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War," by Samuel Hynes (1998).
Of the three, Hynes' is a "literary analysis of combatant diaries and memoirs from both world wars and Vietnam," Dunne tells us, so it is not a frontal treatment of Okinawa. Still, Hynes, a Princeton professor of literature who has edited, among other things, the Library of America's two-volume compilation "Reporting World War II" (1995), made bombing runs on Okinawa as a 20-year-old pilot and has left some accounts of that experience. To quote from a passage Dunne cites, Hynes recollects the scene after 14 million tons of bombs dropped (and that was only midway through the battle).