THE MEDIC

Novelist Litwak (Waiting for the News, not reviewed) pens an unsentimental WWII memoir that serves as a reality-check against the Spielbergian hyperbole and “Greatest Generation” nostalgia currently clouding our vision of that conflict.

When he was called up in 1943, 17-year-old University of Michigan freshman Litwak was disappointed by his medical corps assignment. “Medics carried no weapons,” he writes. “They were obliged to treat enemy wounded as well as their own. . . . I had imagined myself an armed, vengeful warrior.” By the end of this terse, vivid, occasionally funny, quietly ironic, often brutal narrative, young Leo has matured under considerable duress beyond this naïve view of war and his place in it. From his encounters with anti-Semitic officers during basic training in South Carolina through his first experiences with dead and dying buddies to his final weeks as part of the American force occupying the defeated Saxon town of Grossdorf, Litwak learns one lesson after another about death, cruelty, vengeance, survival, and moral ambiguity. His teachers include fellow soldiers like Maurice Sully (who sings about oral sex and loots the houses of fleeing German civilians) and Roy Jones (a farm boy who takes pleasure in assassinating German POWs), as well as small-time hustlers, enslaved Slavic workers, drunken Russian soldiers, starving German women trading sex for provisions, and other characters indelibly drawn in stripped-down prose. Love and altruism only occasionally brighten this dark picture. After V-E Day, Leo stops briefly in Paris on a futile mission to rekindle a “romance” with a prostitute he’d met there, then eventually goes home. “I wanted to strip away any evidence of war,” he realizes. “I didn’t ever again want to hear rockets or be summoned to give aid. I didn’t ever again want to dig in or see anyone wounded or suffer anyone’s dying. . . . Let that all be in the past, cleansed by recollection.”

An unflinching portrait of the times.