The typical junior-ranks twentieth-century memoirs are about war. Not about World War I or about the Vietnam War, but about ‘war’ as a human phenomenon. They normally care very little about the facts of their particular war, so much so that some memoirists intentionally change some facts or write completely fictional accounts modeled on their experiences, which nevertheless claim to give the reader a ‘true’ image of war. In contrast, the entity ‘war’ completely dominates their memoirs, to the degree that it sometimes replaces the memoirist as the chief protagonist. Many memoirists say that their story is ‘about war’, or their relations with war. Perhaps the best example is Larteguy's memoirs. The book's very name is The Face of War, and throughout the book Larteguy refers to war as ‘she’ rather than ‘it’.

As Larteguy's title indicates, what interests the memoirists above all is the image of war. They do not seek to correct this or that fact or to re-write the history of a particular war, but rather to replace one image of war with another. The war-image that they seek to replace is the fictional image dominating the mind of the civilian public. This fictional image is derived not so much from history books, as from fiction books and to a much larger extent from movies. Consequently, memoirists care little about history books, and perceive their enemy above all as the movies.