A green second lieutenant from Pasadena, California, Paul Fussell was wounded while hunting Germans in the forests of Alsace during the last year of World War II. The shell fragments that “wiped away” most of his platoon punctured his legs and back, forcing him to convalesce while the European theater concluded. Alive and ashamed of it, Fussell became “fascinated and sometimes obsessed” with his wartime experience. Much as novelist and fellow veteran Joseph Heller did, Fussell noticed the echoes of war in the civilian life into which he was honorably discharged. He eventually converted his soldier’s ruminations into a scholarly vocation, becoming a literary historian who often served, through his magazine essays and interviews, as a public remembrancer of the horrors of technological warfare. Civilians and politicians were allowed to ignore and glorify the grisly details, but even they could not escape the power of war to mold human experience across generations. For Fussell,