Dong Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.

• Author: Shuger, Scott

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...