Continuing from where we left off in War Diaries Issue 5, we want to reiterate the importance of veterans writing for themselves.
Writing Military Biography/Autobiography
The book is an autobiography, and as a historian and biographer, I was given a front-row seat to a first-hand account of the Swedish military experience in the 2000s. We were introduced by a mutual friend, also a soldier.
Veterans and Generals
While we sometimes think of how things must have been during the Second World War or some conflict in the distant past, we will most likely never know – after all how could we ever truly know the feelings and norms of people at a different time?
The Continuities and Discontinuities of War
‘Existing military doctrine and training will very quickly prove challenging or out of date during the initial combat of a new war,’ a hypothesis associated with the eminent historian Sir Michael Howard. Before 2022, many theorists and pundits were strongly of the opinion that there was no chance of Putin invading Ukraine. Many of us held this position despite the ongoing conflict in the east of Ukraine and the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Maybe it was a sort of self-deception, and this in itself is a topic that we will explore in a future issue.
Thinking Twice Before Praising War on Social Media
We are not trying to censor social media but merely asking people to consider how their posts will look in time to come.