Soldiers' stories of the Falklands War: recomposing trauma in memoir

This article will analyse the role of soldiers' own accounts in the construction of the Falklands War as disproportionately traumatic. The war was Britain's first following the development of a diagnostic model for post-traumatic stress disorder and this greatly influenced the value given to veterans' experiences. Writing memoirs of war was seen as a therapeutic practice. This article uses two case studies, Ken Lukowiak and Vince Bramley, to re-evaluate the role of catharsis in memoirs of warfare and to turn the historian's attention to what happens next when soldiers tell or sell their stories of war.