English professor (em.) Earl Anderson (Cleveland State Univ.) defines "friendly fire" as a "covert semantic category" (5). Though what it designates is described in Homer, Caesar, the Song of Roland, Armenian epic poetry, and many other texts, the term itself is only fifty years old.[1] Though he claims his book concerns "a narrative trope in the literature of war," he also considers films as well as real-life incidents documented in histories, letters, diaries, and memoirs (6). He has gathered an impressive catalogue of examples.

The author defends a wide semantic perimeter around both deliberate[2] and accidental[3] wounding and killing of allies and fellow soldiers. He briefly considers films like Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987)—in which an officer's abusive discipline produces a Marine company's collective punishment for one man's alleged transgressions and a private's revenge (69).

Anderson also studies the more common situation of a killer not having intended to harm anyone or even realizing he has done so. He includes as instances of friendly fire the trampling of fellow soldiers during headlong retreats from the battlefield. Even pushing comrades over a cliff or into the sea in panic constitutes "friendly fire" in his view. Such traumatic battle casualties clearly constitute "friendly" injuries, but "fire"? For the author's purposes, yes.

In the Iliad, Trojans, fleeing a perceived imminent attack by their super-enemy Achilles, kill fellow Trojans and allies. Thucydides describes Athenians mistakenly killing allied soldiers in a night battle at Syracuse. Scipio caused Mago's Carthaginian troops stationed at New Carthage in Spain (209 BCE) to panic and stampede over each other. Sulla's repulse of Mithridates's troops running downhill caused them to be impaled by their own spears as they rushed over the cliffs of Mount Thurium. In the Aeneid, Trojan commandos in Achaean disguise[4] are attacked by their compatriots. During Belisarius's campaign near Florence, terrified Roman troops trampled each other in retreat in a gross failure of command and control.[5] In ancient accounts, the gods are often invisible agents, including Panic himself, Athena in Homer and Herodotus, and local hero-deities like Marathonian Echetlaeus and Marathon himself,[6] sometimes enabling a few good men to rout many enemies.[7]

The US Army's internal investigations of friendly-fire incidents have often resulted in cover-ups and the classifying of such events as "top secret" (85). While friendly fire is usually invisible to officers behind the lines, who anyway enjoy a "culture of impunity," punishments for killing one's own are generally meted out to the lowest possible subordinate in the chain of command (95).[8] Incompetent officers charge subordinates with insubordination.

Anderson finds many friendly-fire incidents on both land and sea in Thucydides,[9] for example, the Corinthians at Sybota and the Athenians at Delion. He cites Gulf War instances of wrong split-second decisions by fighter pilots, despite the implementation of "deconfliction" tactics to avoid air-to-air damage to allied aircraft struck by their fragmentation bombs. The fictional works of Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane on the US Civil War contain friendly-fire mishaps. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 (1972) features Russians firing on their own—Tolstoy's Napoleonic wars all over again. Anderson's mingling of fictional narratives with letters and memoirs in juxtaposed paragraphs may confuse readers.

Lethal "non-adaptive behavior" extends beyond friendly fire per se to include the unintended self-inflicted consequences of deploying "war elephants,"[10] chariots, cavalry, including "wonder horses," archery, and gunnery, siege warfare, and investments in infrastructure requiring extensive training. Procopius's Goths botched naval strategies, tactics, and maneuvers by obstructing or colliding with each other and impeding their own reserves (127). Unpremeditated internecine strife of all against all doomed their fleet.

Anderson explores, too, "the ironic mode" of reporting the shooting of comrades, on purpose or "accidentally on purpose." In a chapter on "The Banality of Friendly Fire," he discusses Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895), William Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), set in World War I, and Joseph Heller's portrayal in Catch-22 (1961) of Milo Minderbinder's bizarre maneuvers in battles of World War II. The ironic mode was well suited to the purpose of responding to "the fatuous discourse" (143) of American war propaganda and Pentagon euphemisms about Viet Nam (domino theory, enhanced interrogation, war of attrition, inflated body counts, the Red Menace). "Friendly fire," not originally a military euphemism, came to unprecedented prominence in Viet Nam, a conflict that commanded far less popular and soldierly enthusiasm than earlier wars and inspired works like Philip Caputo's Rumor of War (1977), Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977), and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990). Soldiers in Viet Nam had to learn ways of avoiding the friendly fire of artillery and fighter-bombers striking their targets according to hastily determined coordinates (58). Soldiers sometimes walked on land mines and through machine-gun fire meant for their enemies.

A grimly amusing section of the book concerns mishaps on camp perimeters, for example in latrines visited at night: as one survivor put it, "to take a dump was a crap shoot" (154–57). Since the average age of men fighting in Viet Nam was nineteen, not twenty-six, as in World War II (158), and soldiers were more often rotated out of duty, blame for friendly fire was often put on FNGs (Fuckin' New Guys).

In the book's last two chapters, "War-Cries and Passwords" and "Uncanny Disclosure," we learn that confusion over a war-cry in the Norwegian Sverris Saga led the Birkibeins to victory over the Jämts before 1200 CE (165), when challenge and response passwords failed to preserve those who had devised them.

Earl Anderson has usefully canvassed actual and fictional episodes of friendly fire to expose the limits of military command and the absurdities of war: "men crowded together ... crushing each other, dying stepping over the dying, killing each other..." (31), as Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace. His broad perspective is well suited to expand our awareness of one source of miserable self-diminishment in war and the literature of war. If only books could prevent military disasters of this type.