Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [216]
I think that Killer of Men was born there. I love the Greek and Turkish Aegean, and the history of it. Before Saddam Hussein wrecked it in August, my carrier battle group had a near perfect summer, cruising the wine-dark sea where the Greeks and Persians fought.
But it may have been born when talking to various Vietnam veterans, returning from that war – a war that may not have been worse than any other war, but loomed large in my young consciousness of conflict. My grandfather and my father and my uncle – all veterans – said things, when they thought I wasn’t around, that led me to suspect that while many men can be brave, some men are far more dangerous in combat than others.
Still later, I was privileged to serve with various men from the Special Operations world, and I came to know that even among them – the snake-eaters – there were only a few who were the killers. I listened to them talk, and I wondered what kind of a man Achilles really was. Or Hector. And I began to wonder what made them, and what kept them at it, and the thought stayed with me while I flew and served in Africa and saw various conflicts and the effects that those conflicts have on all the participants, from the first Gulf War to Rwanda and Zaire.
Killer of Men is my attempt to understand the inside of such men.
This book was both very easy and very hard to write. I have thought about Killer of Men since 1990 in some way or other; when I sat down to put my thoughts into the computer, the book seemed to write itself, and even now, when I type these final words, I am amazed at how much of it seemed to be waiting, prewritten, inside my head. But the devil is still in the details, and my acknowledgements are all about the investigation and research of those details.
The broad sweep of the history of the Ionian Revolt is really known to us only from Herodotus and, to a vastly lesser extent, from Thucydides. I have followed Herodotus in almost every respect, except for the details of how the tiny city-state of Plataea came to involve herself with Athens. That, to be frank, I made up – although it is based on a theory evolved over a hundred conversations with amateur and professional historians. First and foremost, I have to acknowledge the contribution of Nicolas Cioran, who cheerfully discussed Plataea’s odd status every day as we worked out in a gymnasium, and sometimes fought sword to sword. My trainer and constant sparring partner John Beck deserves my thanks – both for a vastly improved physique, and for helping give me a sense of what real training for a life of violence might have been like in the ancient world. And my partner in the reinvention of ancient Greek xiphos fighting, Aurora Simmons, deserves at least equal thanks.
Among professional historians, I was assisted by Paul McDonnell-Staff and Paul Bardunias, by the entire brother- and sisterhood of RomanArmyTalk.com and the web community there, and by the staff of the Royal Ontario Museum (who possess and cheerfully shared the only surviving helmet attributable to the Battle of Marathon), as well as the staff of the Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, who possess the best-preserved ancient aspis and provided me with superb photos to use in recreating it. I also received help from the library staff of the University of Toronto, where, when I’m rich enough, I’m a student, and from Toronto’s superb Metro Reference Library. Every novelist needs to live in a city where universal access to JSTOR is free and on his library card. The staff of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland – just across the street from my mother’s apartment, conveniently – were cheerful and helpful, even when I came back to look at the same helmet for the sixth time. And James Davidson, whose superb book, Greeks and Greek Love helped me think about the thorny issues of ancient Greek sexuality, was also useful to a novelist with too many questions.
Excellent as professional historians are – and my version of the Persian Wars owes a great deal to many