I write about war. I almost said "I write about war for money," but that's not strictly true; I get paid to teach, or I get paid because I'm just the awesome person I am, but nobody's actually paying me to write about war and nobody will for several years yet.
One way or another, though, the part of my daily work that draws the most attention is writing about war. Specifically, my current project is about the American Civil War, or the sliver thereof that bordered the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Memphis.
I've only been writing about war for a little while; we're finishing up Year Five. Before that, I wrote about medieval merchants and burghers...and nobody wanted to touch that, fascinating as they are. So war it is, and war it likely shall be for the rest of my life.
I think if you're going to write about war, you have to have some big, overarching meta-notion of what war fundamentally is. Not necessarily whether it's right or wrong--the ethics of a particular war or whatever--but what philosophically undergirds it, what makes war war, what guides this human activity through all of history.
For me, it's fairly simple. War, at the surface, can be many things at various levels at different times. It can be ugly, but sometimes beautiful; it has cowards and heroes, killers and lovers, good and evil. Brilliance and stupidity, and an ache of gray drab boredom spreading over the battlefield like fog. But what war really is, what animates everything else, is a sheer unrelenting ridiculousness.
There's so much random chance, so much that can make any plan go awry, to push a soldier over the edge from hero to coward, to make a "grand plan" look brilliant or stupid. And then, of course, there's the ridiculousness that lies near the root of so many wars that made them exist in the first place.
This makes writing on war take on a certain tone. Most of the "characters" in what I write are neither knights nor knaves but fools (innocent) and blunderers (not so innocent), of all ranks. What happens when these two whirling maelstroms of armies collide has less to do with trumpets and drums than with a million little accidents. There are historical actors, mind, and decisions matter (what to put in the maelstrom, which direction to kick it to, etc), but there is a considerable space for the irrational, and especially for the concatenation of little decisions that turn into something very large--and possibly horrible.
One of the famous, popular authors on war I most admire is Rick Atkinson, who is writing a trilogy on the US Army in Europe during WWII. The story is one of one great idea after another coming unglued, sometimes with grisly results, and then other plans coalescing from the pear-shaped plans that just died in the earlier chapter. The plane is perpetually being duct-taped together as it's in the air.
I almost got to meet Rick Atkinson, if only I'd known who he was. I was working in the Army's archives in Carlisle Barracks, PA and I notice that this one person in the library--this one very short person in the library--was getting a lot of attention. I go over to the sign-in sheet and try to deduce who he is. "Who's Rick Atkinson?" I ask myself. "Who's Rick Atkinson?" I email my advisor. "YOU GO OVER THERE AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF RIGHT NOW" comes the response...but by then he had gone; so sad. I'm not sure what I would have said. "My advisor told me to come over here and say 'hi,' but I've never heard of you and I don't have any of your books." That'd have gone over well. Good came out of it, though; I decided to explore his books..and they are excellent. The WWII books, his book on Petraeus and the 101st Airborne, the works. All good stuff, and heartily recommended.
Which reminds me that I should put up a reading list for military occupations...
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