Along these lines, I think the war autobiography that delivered one of the hardest punches between the eyes I've ever read in a war memoir is Farley Mowatt's. Have you ever read that one? Trading on his reputation as a humorist, he wrote a very funny, light and engaging memoir about himself as a young Canadian kid dealing with boot camp, losing his virginity, etc, and it's all written in the same light, tongue-in-cheek tone as most of his animal books. Until the last few chapters, when he experiences battle for the first time and ends up in the meat grinder of Italy. And then there's a horrifying tonal switch as just about everyone he knows gets killed, there's no supplies, no backup, and they keep getting ordered forward and pulverized every time they try to advance. He has a psychotic break from the stress, and that's where the book ends, in mid-battle with Mowatt having pretty much lost touch with reality in the middle of a corpse-strewn battlefield.

It's not that the brutality of war is something that most war memoirs shy away from, but the way it gently leads you into the battlefield with a lightly funny touch and then plunges you straight into utter brutality of war and just leaves you there, dangling on a narrative cliffhanger, is really well done. It's a brilliant way to use the book's structure, as well as reader expectations about him as an author, to convey the experience that he had, as an idealistic 18-year-old who had no idea what he was getting himself into.