Trained to kill: Soldiers at war by Theodore Nadelson Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005.  208 p.

This moving book, challenging both in its topics and its insights, represents a significant part of the professional psychoanalytic career of its author. Theodore Nadelson spent 40 years (from the aftermath of the war in Vietnam through work with soldiers from the Gulf War) treating American veterans in inand outpatient contexts at a Veterans Administration hospital in Boston. In this book, he summarizes a lifetime of observation and contemplation, holding out to the reader a powerful and tragic complexity: war making has an intense, mesmerizing effect on men, on their passions, loyalties, identities and bodies. In literary and clinical examples, Nadelson demonstrates how the excitement and the thrilling confirmation of identity and masculinity that military life, training, and fighting bring come to be inevitably counterpoised with the terrible unfixable sequelae of soldiering.

Nadelson's book draws on a number of different literary traditions. It is the memoir of a man (part Bildungsroman, part professional diary, part clinical notes) who has seen how closely his ideas and identifications with masculinity link him to military