The Way It Ought To Be.

• Author: Bacevich, Andrew J.

THE KILLER ANGELS, Michael Shaara's immensely popular novel of the Civil War, recounts the Battle of Gettysburg from the point of view of those who fought

there, artfully blending history and imagination. On the Union side, Shaara tells his story chiefly through the eyes of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine Volunteers, who actually won the Medal of Honor defending Little Round Top.

At the outset of the narrative, Shaara's protagonist finds himself facing a delicate leadership challenge far removed from combat. On the eve of battle, the high command has saddled Chamberlain with 120 mutineers, the remnants of another Maine regiment whose members have seen enough of war. His orders are to make the mutineers fight--and to shoot them if they refuse. A citizen-soldier himself, Chamberlain understands the futility of attempting to browbeat or coerce volunteers. Moreover, he cannot conceive of ordering his own troops to turn their guns on men from their home state. So rather than making threats, Chamberlain decides on a riskier course: employing the plain, unadorned idiom of American idealism, he simply reminds the disgruntled mutineers of the Cause for which they first took up arms, asking them on that basis to set aside their grievances and join his regiment.

"This is a different kind of army", Chamberlain tells them.

If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. ... We're an army going out to set other men free.

It is a masterful performance. Moreover, nothing about that performance is contrived or false. When Chamberlain stipulates freedom as the peculiarly American purpose for which the Union Army fights, we know that he speaks with conviction: the speech works. The mutineers join his own battle-depleted ranks, providing the essential increment of fighting power that enables Chamberlain's regiment to hold Little Round Top, the action on which victory at Gettysburg, and arguably the entire war, turns.

This belief that Americans at war constitute--or at least ought to constitute--"a different kind of army" exercises a powerful hold on the national consciousness. But there is more at work in this belief than mere patriotic pride. The insistence that Americans fight "to set other men free" has helped to validate the nation's transformation from a republic of modest means and ambitions into a military superpower with interests spanning the globe. In the aftermath of the Cold War, as the use of force by the United States has become increasingly...