Glad I’m not in the Russian army

Policy Review has a rambling essay on military memoirs that I found especially interesting for its discussion, at the end, of a recent memoir of serving in the Russian army. I hadn’t heard of One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, by Arkady Babchenko, but was struck by some of it quoted in the essay:

‘This is not an army, but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal classes, lawless apart from the dictates of the jackals that run it.’ In this ‘army living by prison camp rules,’ the end product is a soldier without a conscience and ‘with a coldness inside [him] and a hatred of the whole world, with no past and no future.’"

Meanwhile, here is a roundup of recent U.S. military memoirs. (How can I not like an essay that says in an aside, "Ricks is even more right about that than he realizes?" Of course, he goes on to say that, "Ricks is wrong to think we can rely on ROTC instead of, rather than along with, the academies" — but alas he misses the point that in advocating closing the military academies and war colleges, I advocated moving to a Sandhurst-like approach, rather than just relying on ROTC. And send colonels to civilian institutions to learn how to think strategically.)

Speaking of military memoirs, Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday. He isn’t generally known for military writing, but his novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is a good farce about an officer assigned to set up a roving brothel for troops isolated in the Amazonian jungle.