Dong Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.

PAUL FUSSELL HAS EMERGED over the years as a skillful exposer of the fake elements in America's public culture. He's done this for laughs in such books as Class and BAD, and in far darker terms with his deconstruction of World War II boosterism, Wartime. As often as not, these critiques were implicit autobiography--the reader sensed that Fussell could spot the phony because he'd lived the real. Now, with this book, the life story becomes explicit and we get to see just how an academic--an English professor, for God's sake--became such a reliable cultural bullshit detector in the best tradition of Mark Twain, Thorstein Veblen (also a professor), and H.L. Mencken.

The explanation begins and ends with this: World War II. If Hitler had been smothered in his crib, Fussell might never have left Pasadena, Calif., his square hometown. But leave he did--ending up in the mud of France as a 20-year-old infantry officer. You could live a lifetime in Pasadena without learning what Fussell did his first morning on the front line when he discovered that the position he'd come into the night before was surrounded by dozens of dead teenaged German soldiers: "My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away all at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just" This was the beginning of four months of ground combat during which Fussell lived in near-constant fear, saw friends killed right next to him, and, finally, was badly wounded.

Even though the concept of post-traumatic stress syndrome hadn't been formulated yet, Fussell undoubtedly came back to America with a raging case of it. He describes his after-combat self as possessing an "intense skepticism about official utterances of any sort, military, political, ecclesiastical, or academic," and says that he was "angry at the whole postwar atmosphere of public misrepresentation and fatuous optimism " Back again at Pomona College and then on to Harvard for graduate school, Fussell was "now convinced that my duty was criticism, meaning not carping, but the perpetual obligation of evaluation" In effect, Fussell's life's work of critically studying people and the language they're enmeshed in is that of an angry young man growing old, but not soft.

Not everybody who survives combat learns what Paul Fussell did (Why didn't George Bush or Bob Dole;), so a compilation of his scholia is useful; although in the form of a memoir, that's what this book essentially is. Some of the insights are narrowly military; one might be summed up as "Mistrust exotic military contraptions" (in Fussell's experience they don't work) and another as "Mistrust night operations" (ditto). But many are, despite their military origin, widely applicable. For instance, Fussell tells us that in his officer training, much time was spent on the maneuver of having one half of the platoon provide covering fire while the lieutenant in charge led the other half around to the enemy's flank for a surprise assault. It didn't take much actual warfare for Fussell to divine the technique's "signal defect, which quite effectively prevented its being applied. Namely, the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy's flank is" The lesson here, "Mistrust school solutions," is useful far beyond the battlefield--even in, or perhaps especially in, school.

Another wide-ranging would be "Mistrust the elites" In his war service, Fussell was just a dogface with gold bars, so right away he developed a properly jaundiced view of generals and staff officers. And over time he became convinced that the fraud, hypocrisy, ignorance, and greed that have increasingly marked America since V-J Day have been enabled by the withering away of the average citizen's resistance to pronouncements and paradigms from on high. In criticizing the elites of academe, politics, journalism, the class structure, and business, Fussell's goal has been to resuscitate the once-valued great American trait of thinking for yourself.

It's important to plumb the significance of "mistrust" here. If cynicism is our leading social disease (one in which the elites promiscuously traffic, because they can buy insulation from its consequences), skepticism is a main ingredient of any social vaccine. That is, Fussell's variety of mistrust isn't the cheap, talk-show-pundit kind. He forcefully advocates an ethic of maximum questioning, not because nothing really matters, but precisely because some things do--the first-hand experience of a subject, jargon-free language, and the dissemination of facts no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient, for instance. In one of his most famous essays, Fussell offers his own bloodstained knowledge of ground combat in opposition to the view held by many armchair commentators that the U.S. was precipitous and even hateful in the way it ended the Second World War. (Unlike them, Fussell was on his way to the invasion of Japan when the atom bomb was dropped.) In this discussion, the opinion-making elites are discounting the American and Japanese lives at stake and it's Fussell who's holding them dear. And who does he thank for their salvation? He thanks God. In other words, skepticism, unlike cynicism, wants to believe. It just has high standards.

World War II gave Fussell's generation zig-zag lives. (He describes his own trajectory as "from college to professional killer, and then to benign professor") And although that was, to put it mildly, wrenching for those lucky enough to survive, there was a moral payoff: The professional killer forever after counseled the college professor. The zig always informed the zag, which made for a keener sense of the dilemmas and values of the wider world than we've seen in any generation since. Younger people seem to have forgotten that you don't need a war for that benefit. Fussell's detour of the military is still available, and there are countless additional complex, other-regarding arenas that can likewise stimulate practical wisdom and moral judgment: the schools, the various levels of government, youth and community service organizations, hospitals, hospices, old-age homes, and so on. Branching your life out into such places, at least for a little while, is the key to becoming what Fussell did: a socially useful skeptic, not a socially useless cynic.