How did US military personnel represent their experiences in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century? Joseph P. McCallus answers this question in Forgotten under a Tropical Sun: War Stories by American Veterans in the Philippines, 1898–1913. McCallus provides close readings of sixty-two publications by sixty men from the United States who served in the Philippine–American War. Some of the authors, such as Commodore George Dewey, are well known; others, such as the contributors to the American Oldtimer, more obscure. The primary-source bibliography makes this book an excellent reference work, with the close readings that McCallus provides adding to its value.

Some of the topics that McCallus expounds upon are the roles of the picturesque and macabre, coverage of the individual within the larger military collective, attentiveness to masculinity and emasculation, feelings of betrayal by higher-ups (whether officers or politicians), representations of Filipinos, and the idealization of soldiers as emblems of the nation, with their individual deeds standing in for national purpose. McCallus also provides insightful commentary on flesh-witnessing, meaning a way of knowing that contrasts with eyewitnessing. Whereas eyewitnessing can be relayed to others, flesh-witnessing can only be felt and is thus not transmissible through print. “Because the audience cannot entirely understand it,” McCallus explains, “the writer gains unmitigated credibility and extreme authority” (14).

McCallus convincingly explains how various passages work: how contrasts between the obscene and ordinary, for example, promote the idea of military men as sensitive human beings, and of the writer as particularly feeling and thus more sympathetic. He finds that US accounts of the war in the Philippines only rarely express lost idealism, guilt, or regret. With few exceptions, these are justifications that fuse personal to national growth.

McCallus structures Forgotten under a Tropical Sun chronologically, starting with the defeat of the Spanish fleet in 1898, stretching through 1913 (the year that combat wound down in Mindanao and neighboring islands), and ending with recollections of postwar life. This structure helps McCallus advance the thesis that the war itself, in its different stages, led representations to change over time, whether in accounts published contemporaneously or many years later. If accounts of arrival and the early days of war idealized military service, then those from the guerrilla period played up barbarity and those from the southern and garrison duty phases of the war foregrounded more picturesque and paternalist scenes. Though justified as a way to make interpretive themes stand out, structuring the book chronologically provides a temporal and spatial order to the US presence in the Philippines that McCallus admits hides greater messiness on the ground.

The lengthy primary-source passages that occupy much of the volume are well chosen. McCallus brings to light the “rope cure” – akin to the better-known “water cure” but involving a rope – and he also reprints passages on casual murder, property confiscation under the threat of death, rape, “black paint” (destruction through fire) and other crimes and violent acts. But surprisingly, given the contents of some of these accounts, McCallus tries to take a pass on evaluating the war: “The Philippine war was a complex affair, and these veterans stood at the center of that complexity” (220).

Although McCallus situates the texts he analyzes in the context of historical scholarship (albeit with some paragraphs more thoroughly footnoted than others), and although his readings provide insights into the US military presence in the Philippines, his main concern is representation, whether of the self, the Philippines, members of different ethnic and racialized groups, US policies, or the US nation. One of the themes that runs through the book is the literary genres that influenced narratives, among them Romanticism, American frontier mythology, and military memoirs. Yet as the title suggests, the end game in this account is recovery: to bring the forgotten stories of US veterans and thereby the veterans themselves back to living historical memory.

That raises the question: why? Though loath to take a stance on the war, McCallus does not hide his admiration for the US men who fought it, or, more specifically, for the white male pen wielders who figure in this book, ending his account with an expression of regret “that their lives and achievements have largely been left behind … Monuments to their service are rare. Their memories remain forgotten stories of forgotten men in a faraway place” (220). There are many virtues to this worthwhile and teachable book, but its contributions to postcolonial lines of analysis would not rank highly among them.