“War is Heller. It is also Tolstoy, Owen, Vonnegut and Hemingway, among many others.

But according to the Pentagon, war — at least the impending war in Iraq — is Shakespeare, the 5th-century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and two modern bestsellers about heroism and wartime correspondence. Before Christmas the US Defence Department began distributing free, pocket-sized copies of these books to its troops, to ensure that soldiers are improving their minds while removing Saddam. More than 100,000 copies have been given away so far.

The project, set up by a group of publishers with charitable support and Pentagon help, is a deliberate echo of the mass distribution of paperbacks to American soldiers that took place in the Second World War; the largest handout of free literature in history. In 1942 the US War Department hit on the idea of the Armed Services Edition, books specifically for servicemen in the field. The books were cheap to produce, horizontal in format, oblong-shaped to slip into an ammunition pouch, with large print to be read by candle or torchlight and cover designs resembling film posters. The titles catered for every brow height, from the Odyssey to Forever Amber; from Dickens to Twain to Virginia Woolf; literary classics, popular novels, non-fiction and even plays. ” Times of London

Of course, the publisher-organizer of the project, which echoes the mass giveaway of paperbacks from the highbrow to the low- to GIs during WWII, chose to include a book he himself edited among the four books distributed so far.