Friendly Fire in the Literature of War

<p> The term friendly fire was coined in the 1970s but the theme appears in literature from ancient times to the present. It begins the narrative in Aeschylus's <I>Persians</I> and Larry Heinemann's <I>Paco's Story</I>. It marks the turning point in Homer's <I>Iliad</I> Virgil's <I>Aeneid</I> the <I>Chanson de Roland</I> Stephen Crane's <I>The Red Badge of Courage</I> and Tim O'Brien's <I>Going After Cacciato</I>. It is the subject of transformative disclosure in Jaan Kross's <I>Czar's Madman</I> Ron Kovic's <I>Born on the Fourth of July</I> O'Brien's <I>In the Lake of the Woods</I> and A.B. Yehoshua's <I>Friendly Fire</I>. In some stories events propel the characters into a friendly-fire catastrophe as in Thomas Taylor's <I>A Piece of this Country</I> and Oliver Stone's 1986 film <I>Platoon</I>. This study examines friendly fire in a broad range of literary contexts.</p>