"As a former soldier, what struck me is the absolutely heartless way that war was being pursued by the Americans, partly I think because of the race problem. The Vietnamese to us were not merely communists, they were nasty little yellow people without souls. It didn't matter how we blew them up or how we bombed them or how we burned their villages and so on. I was very struck by that. And one thing I was trying to do in The Great War and Modern Memory was to awaken a sort of civilian sympathy for the people who suffer on the ground in wartime, and that's really an act that I've been performing, oh, ever since 1945, I suppose."
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Literary criticsHistorians from the United StatesCritics from the United StatesPeople from Los AngelesUniversity of Pennsylvania faculty
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Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell (22 March 1924 - 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, World War I, World War II, and social class.
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