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Paul Fussell, author of Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, discusses the rigors of war and the personal lessons he learned from his experiences in World War II.

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JIM LEHRER: David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Paul Fussell, author of Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.

DAVID GERGEN: Paul, World War II has entered American folklore as the good war, the last good war in many people’s opinions. You had a very different experience and came to a very different conclusion. Tell us about it.

PAUL FUSSELL, Author, Doing Battle: Well, I think it was a good war in many ways. It was a war that stamped out evil on both sides of the United States, both the Atlantic and the Pacific. And it was a good war to the degree that medical treatment was much better than it ever had been before for the troops, and so on, but no war can be called a good thing. It is awful. It is hellish, irresponsible, murderous, corrupting, and I tried to show in my book wartime, the way that war corrupts, and not just people who fought it, but newspapers, journalism, the general popular language, and so on. We’re just getting out of it now. But it’s amazing how easy it is to shock people by suggesting it was a war and, therefore, it could not have been good. I’m fond of quoting Benjamin Franklin: "There’s no such thing as a good war or a bad peace."

DAVID GERGEN: Your views are very much shaped by your own personal experiences. Let’s talk about those .You grew up in Southern California, Pasadena, paradise, as you called it, went on to Pomona, and you seemed very much the innocent--

PAUL FUSSELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: --coming out of that.

PAUL FUSSELL: Very much. I came from a privileged background.

DAVID GERGEN: And you then were called up during the Second World War, and you actually enjoyed boot camp.

PAUL FUSSELL: I did. I made the mistake of getting in the infantry. But at first it was rather fun. It was kind of athletic and lots of fun. It was fast, and amusing, and so forth, and then all of a sudden one realized what the infantry was for. It was for killing the maximum number of young men like you and on the other side, the Germans had that view, what they were doing, they were trying to kill us. And so after six months of that one became rather embittered about talk about how wonderful the war was. It was a wonderful war in many ways. It extricated appalling wickedness on the part of the Nazis.

DAVID GERGEN: But then you went off after your training--this was toward the end of the war--1944, you went off to Europe.

PAUL FUSSELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: To fight.

PAUL FUSSELL: Exactly.

DAVID GERGEN: As a young second lieutenant.

PAUL FUSSELL: Exactly. Leading a rifle platoon, which is the absolute bottom of everything: authority, danger, and so on. And very few of those people survived.

DAVID GERGEN: Now, what opened your eyes?

PAUL FUSSELL: What opened my eyes? Well, it took a long time actually because it didn’t happen all at once. But began opening my eyes was discovering that what I’d thought was a kind of fun setup of people marching in formation and wearing nice uniforms, nice patches on their shoulders and so on, gold bars, cross rifles, was an operation of mass murder closer to the criminalities known in New York and Chicago than anything noble. I should have known that already if I’d read enough, but I hadn’t. And it took me a little while to get over that. But I think the moment that really jolted me worse was waking up one morning after we had relieved another unit on the front line in Alsace. This was in November, 1944, and I hadn’t seen anything in the darkness when we arrived, but when dawn came, I noticed that we were lying in the midst of an immense field of dead German adolescent boys very much my age, very much people like me. And they’d been shot in various places. There were grenade fragments that hit them in various places. As I looked at those, I began to realize, God, this is what I’m doing here; I’m supposed to kill people like that, and, indeed, I can’t survive unless I do so, while they’re doing the same thing to me. And this is a "no win" situation, a classic. The only thing that’s going to help is for the war to end, but I knew it wouldn’t end because we had insisted upon unconditional surrender. It wouldn’t end either until we got to Berlin or the Soviets got to Berlin, and found that the latter was the way it ended. And that’s when I began to catch on about what war was and how we were really expendable, and that when we fell, other people would fill our ranks, and they would go on that way and go on that way and so on. And the people who were going to suffer were not the soldiers at all because once you’re killed, you’re out of it. You’re in oblivion, as their families on both sides, the German and American.

DAVID GERGEN: Could you tell us for a moment about March 15, 1945.

PAUL FUSSELL: March 15, 1945. I was in an attack accompanied by my sergeant, who I’d been with all the way through training and knew very well, and another second lieutenant, who was in charge of the heavy machine guns, and we did pretty well until the action was almost over, and then the Germans performed a counterattack against us with a tank. And the tank shells came closer and closer and closer. And we were sort of trapped there on top of the German bunker, and I didn’t want to run because I was afraid I’d start a panic or something like that, but finally a shell went off right overhead, and it killed both of them instantly. When I looked at my sergeant, I saw his skin changed from what we call flesh color to white, shirt-color white. I knew he was dead. I couldn’t see the sergeant--I mean, the lieutenant on the machine guns because I couldn’t turn around because I was being hit in the back and in the leg. And one of my men came and dragged me out of this carnage, and he got me to the medic, who helped resuscitate me and so on. But at that moment I thought I’d been killed, and I apparently had been metaphorically, because that moment caused me to meditate as follows: I was killed in 1945. Every month since then has been an absolute gift. And I’ve tried to enjoy them appropriately, and I’ve tried to exploit them appropriately, because I could so easily have been the third person killed on that occasion. And that shows how much luck has to do with it. Luck has much more to do with it than skill, alertness, training, knowledge, the things that you’re invited to believe are so important. The important thing is luck, which you can’t do anything about.

DAVID GERGEN: But yet, as much as you’ve celebrated these as gifts, each month that’s passed, you also became very angry, and you became, as you say, a representative angry man in the 50's and 60's, and indeed, much of that anger pours forth in your memoir. Why the anger?

PAUL FUSSELL: Well, I hope I made it clear in my memoir was what made me really angry was suddenly watching the United States turn full circle and resuscitate the enemy, that is, the Soviet Union, that we’ve been celebrating all these years, not just for its success but for its bravery, clear-mindedness, virtue, and so on, and to be instantly replaced by another set of stage figures, the Germans. And that made me very bitter. This suggested that I hadn’t really been fighting for any principles at all; I’d been fighting for stage notions or images that weren’t at all certain, merely journalistic stuff.

DAVID GERGEN: Now, you’ve come through life then as a professor. You went on and got a Ph.D. at Harvard in English and taught English literature and poetry, and you quote much of it in your book. And you say that basically you’ve taken a stance of an ironist, of this dark, ironic sense of life.

PAUL FUSSELL: Yes.

DAVID GERGEN: What does that mean? What should people think about that?

PAUL FUSSELL: Irony is related to me, to the idea of tragedy, which is--you’ve lost already--you’ve lost already. Everything you touch is going to be defeated by time. You’ve lost. No matter what you make, no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, you cannot win, because right behind you are other people who are going to do the same thing and going to wipe out your memory. So life is essentially ironic, but the distance between what you think will happen and what will happen is immense. And to be conscience of it all the time is to give you both a refined sense of humor and a refined sense of charity. It doesn’t mean you stop your work or worse than you would otherwise. It’s just that you don’t feed your ego with the old materials. Everything you attempt is going to be not very good. It’s hard for Americans to understand because this country is an 18th century country. And it was founded on optimism, founded on the sense that if we’re all good people together, we’re all going to be happy, and it’s all going to be great. But that’s not the way it is. We’re still human beings, and we’re our worst enemies consequently. And know that I think may not solve anything but at least it gives you a properly humorous outlook on things.

DAVID GERGEN: Paul Fussell, thank you very much.

PAUL FUSSELL: Thank you.

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