“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell wrote in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” his classic study of the English literature of the First World War. “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.” The ancient verities of honor and glory were still standing in 1914 when England’s soldier-poets marched off to fight in France. Those young men became modern through the experience of trench warfare, if not in the forms they used to describe it. It was Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence who invented literary modernism while sitting out the war. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen—who all fought in the trenches and, in the last two cases, died there—remained tied to the conventions of the nineteenth century while trying to convey the unprecedented horror of industrial warfare, a condition of existence so murderous and absurd that a romantic or heroic attitude became impossible. The essence of modern understanding is irony, Fussell argued, and it was born on the Western Front.

Fussell wasn’t wrong about the Great War, but, in his insistence on its newness, he underestimated the staying power of military myths for each generation. Fussell cited a newspaper story about a London man who killed himself out of concern that he might not be accepted for service in the Great War, and noted, “How can we forbear condescending to the eager lines at the recruiting stations or smiling at news like this.” But in the summer of 1968 Tim O’Brien, a twenty-one-year-old in a small Minnesota town, a liberal supporter of Eugene McCarthy and an opponent of the war in Vietnam, submitted himself for induction into the United States Army. O’Brien couldn’t bring himself “to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world,” he wrote, in “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” his 1973 Vietnam memoir. “It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite—inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.” Was O’Brien’s fear of dishonor entirely different from the impulse that drove a forty-nine-year-old man to throw himself under a van in 1914?

Or from the thinking that led Brian Turner to volunteer for the U.S. Army in 1998 and go on to serve as an infantry team leader in the badlands of northwestern Iraq? “I signed the paper and joined the infantry because at some point in the hero’s life the hero is supposed to say I swear,” Turner writes in his memoir, “My Life as a Foreign Country” (Jonathan Cape), published earlier this year in the United Kingdom and forthcoming from Norton here. “I raised my hand and said the words because I would’ve been ashamed in the years to come if I hadn’t, even if it didn’t make sense, even if nobody I cared about ever thought about it, even if all the veterans in my family never said a word, or even if they did, saying, It’s cool, Brian, it doesn’t mean a thing, believe me, the uniform doesn’t make the man.” Here’s Kevin Powers, who joined the Army out of high school and ended up as a machine gunner in the same region of Iraq as Turner: “I had by then inferred that the military was where a person went to develop the qualities that I had come to admire in my father, my uncle, and both of my grandfathers. The cliché, in my case, was true: I thought that the army would ‘make me a man.’ ” The scare quotes suggest Fussell’s wised-up irony, but they weren’t enough to keep Powers home. Every generation has to discover what Fussell called the “hope abridged” that waits somewhere beyond the recruiting office. For Americans, this experience has been an overwhelmingly male one, recorded in literature written by men, but that will change as women—such as Kayla Williams, the author of two Iraq memoirs—go off to combat zones.

Soldiers who set out to write the story of their war also have to navigate a minefield of clichés: all of them more or less true but open to qualification; many sowed long before the soldiers were ever deployed, because every war is like every other war. That’s one of them. War is hell is another. War begins in illusion and ends in blood and tears. Soldiers go to war for their country’s cause and wind up fighting for one another. Soldiers are dreamers (Sassoon said that). No one returns from war the same person who went. War opens an unbridgeable gap between soldiers and civilians. There’s no truth in war—just each soldier’s experience. “You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (from “How to Tell a True War Story,” in O’Brien’s story collection “The Things They Carried”).

Irony in modern American war literature takes many forms, and all risk the overfamiliarity that transforms style into cliché. They begin with Hemingway’s rejection, in “A Farewell to Arms,” of the high, old language, his insistence on concreteness: “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”

The style of understated disillusionment remains universally recognizable and pervasively influential in war literature. Vietnam gave us another kind of distancing—black humor, satire, surrealism—often in novels that were not set in Vietnam, such as Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” (A similar mood suffuses “M*A*S*H,” a movie that was nominally about the Korean War.) Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam writing—his memoir, the interlocking stories in “The Things They Carried,” and, especially, his novel “Going After Cacciato”—combined Hemingway’s hard and exact prose with often fantastical incidents, suited to a jungle war against an invisible enemy. The characteristic voice of Vietnam literature became the matter-of-fact statement of hallucinatory evil, poised between humor and horror. It’s heard in the opening paragraph of “Going After Cacciato”: “The rain fed fungus that grew in the men’s boots and socks, and their socks rotted, and their feet turned white and soft so that the skin could be scraped off with a fingernail, and Stink Harris woke up screaming one night with a leech on his tongue.”

O’Brien’s work, like the work of other great war writers, makes violence inseparable from pity. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” a soldier loses his best friend to a booby-trapped artillery shell, and, later that day, he machine-guns a baby water buffalo in the cruellest possible way. The narrator reports that whenever he tells this story some kindhearted older woman will urge him to move on. “I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn’t listening. It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.” This isn’t just the soldier’s love for his war buddies, intense as that attachment can be. It’s a redemptive understanding of their capacity for good and evil both, and of the way that war, more than any other human endeavor, leaves them nowhere to hide.


But Iraq was also different from other American wars. (So far, almost all the new war literature comes from Iraq, perhaps because there weren’t many troops in Afghanistan until 2009, and the minimum lag time between deployment and publication seems to be around five years.) Without a draft, without the slightest sacrifice asked of a disengaged public, Iraq put more mental distance between soldiers and civilians than any war of its duration that I can think of. The war in Iraq, like the one in Vietnam, wasn’t popular; but the troops, at least nominally, were—wildly so. (Just watch the crowd at a sports event if someone in uniform is asked to stand and be acknowledged.) Both sides of the relationship, if they were being honest, felt its essential falseness. A tiny number of volunteers went off to fight, often two or three times, in a war and a country that seemed incomprehensible. They returned to heroes’ welcomes and a flickering curiosity. Because hardly anyone back home really wanted to know, the combatant’s status turned into a mark of otherness, a blessing and a curse. The title of David Finkel’s recent book about the struggles of soldiers returned from Iraq, “Thank You for Your Service,” captures all the bad faith of a civilian population that views itself as undeserving, and the equivocal position of celebrated warriors who don’t much feel like saying, “You’re welcome.”

So it’s not surprising that the new war literature is intensely interested in the return home. The essential scene of First World War writing is the mass slaughter of the trenches. In the archetypal Vietnam story, a grunt who can never find the enemy walks into physical and moral peril. In much of the writing about Iraq, the moment of truth is a reunion scene at an airport or a military base—families holding signs, troops looking for their loved ones, an unease sinking deep into everyone.

In “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” (Little, Brown), Kevin Powers’s first collection of poetry, published this month, the mood is meditative and convalescent, the poet’s mind reopening after a great shock: “I am home and whole, so to speak. / . . . But I can’t remember / how to be alive.” The narrator of Powers’s lyrical and disturbing novel “The Yellow Birds” (which appeared in 2012) is far from whole. Returning from Iraq to rural Virginia, Private John Bartle stands in his mother’s enveloping hug while strangers around them call out thanks: “Yet when she said, ‘Oh, John, you’re home,’ I did not believe her.” “The Yellow Birds” has a fragmentary quality that’s suited to prose by a poet; it’s better at evoking landscapes and states of feeling than at sustained psychological realism. There are remarkable evocations of the uncanniness, even the wonder, of fighting: “When the ringing of the first shots subsided, we heard bullets, sounds like small rips in the air, reports of rifles from somewhere we couldn’t see. I was struck by a kind of lethargy, in awe of the decisiveness of every single attenuated moment, observed in minute detail each slender moving branch and the narrow bands of sunlight coming through the leaves. Someone pulled me down to the orchard floor.”

When a glib reporter asks what combat feels like, a character compares it to the moment just before a car accident, when you know it’s going to happen and are helpless to stop it. “Death, or whatever, it’s either coming or it’s not,” he says, “like that split second in a car wreck, except for here it can last for goddamn days.” Whether or not the fictional soldier is likely to have formulated such a thought, it’s one of the best distillations of combat I’ve read.

Back home, Bartle finds that “everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but it’s just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked.” Private Bartle’s homecoming is an extreme case, but his emotions are not.

Journalists and historians have to distort war: in order to find the plot—causation, sequence, meaning—they make war more intelligible than it really is. In the literature by veterans, there are virtually no politics or polemics, in stark contrast to the tendentious way in which most Americans, especially those farthest removed from the fighting, discussed Iraq. This new writing takes the war, though not its terrible cost, as a given. Instead of a coherent explanatory narrative, it presents us with fragments; for example, “Dust to Dust,” a 2012 memoir by Benjamin Busch, a former Marine Corps captain and an actor, is organized not chronologically but around certain materials—metal, bone, blood, ash. Fragments are perhaps the most honest literary form available to writers who fought so recently. Their work lacks context, but it gets closer to the lived experience of war than almost any journalism. It deals in particulars, which is where the heightened alertness of combatants has to remain, and it’s more likely to notice things. To most foreign observers, the landscape of Iraq is relentlessly empty and ugly, like a physical extension of the country’s trauma. But in the poetry and the prose of soldiers and marines the desert comes to life with birdsong and other noises, the moonlit sand breeds dreams and hallucinations.

Like Kevin Powers, Brian Turner is a poet. He’s the Isaac Rosenberg of the Iraq War; romantic by disposition, he resorts to surrealist imagery in order to hold out a margin of human sympathy under the extreme pressure of war. His poems—collected in “Here, Bullet” and “Phantom Noise”—keep returning to the most brutal situations: a suicide car bombing in a Mosul traffic circle, the execution of fifty Iraqi soldiers travelling on minibuses, the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American M.P.s. But violence that begins as fact mingles by metaphor with dreams, eroticism, history, classical poetry, until the borders between individuals and worlds melt away. “The Mutanabbi Street Bombing” is about a famous outdoor book market in Baghdad that was repeatedly blown up by insurgents:

Buildings catch fire. Cafes.

Stationery shops. The Renaissance Bookstore.

A huge column of smoke, a black anvil head

pluming upward, fueled by the Kitah al-Aghani,

al-Isfahani’s Book of Songs, the elegies of Khansa,

the exile poetry of Youssef and al-Azzawi,

religious tracts, manifestos, translations

of Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Neruda—

these book-leaves curl in the fire’s

blue-tipped heat, and the long centuries

handed down from one person to another, verse

by verse, rise over Baghdad.

Turner has at least one truly astonishing poem, “Al-A’imma Bridge.” It describes an incident that took place in 2005, when a Shiite religious procession across a bridge over the Tigris in Baghdad turned into a stampede with the rumor of a suicide bomber, and almost a thousand people were trampled to death or drowned. In a single sentence that cascades over twenty-three free-verse stanzas, Turner imagines those falling, a pregnant woman in an abaya, a young woman from Mosul, and the vision opens up to encompass figures from Iraqi history going back to Babylon, Scheherazade “made speechless by the scale of war,” ghosts woken from their sleep, as the Tigris fills “with bricks from Abu Ghraib, burning vehicles,” razor wire, rubble, bombs of every kind:

give daisies and hyacinths

to this impossible moment, flowers to stand for the lips

unable to kiss them, each in their own bright beauty, flowers

that may light the darkness, as they march deeper into the earth.

It is improbable and moving that an American soldier should write a poem of such generous, Whitmanesque spirit about this one Iraqi disaster. The war kept Americans and Iraqis far apart, as each side learned to fear and distrust the other. “In Vietnam They Had Whores,” as the title of one Iraq War story bluntly puts it—in Iraq they had blast walls and body armor. It was possible for British Tommies to preserve a romantic vision of France, for American grunts to find Vietnam alluring, but very few American troops fell in love with Iraq.

Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis—their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives. His memoir, “My Life as a Foreign Country,” opens with a metaphor of the writer as a drone aircraft, flying at thirty-two thousand feet over his life, “gathering the necessary intelligence, all that I have done, all that we have done, compressed into the demarcations annotated in the map below.” Turner’s sympathetic imagination takes in even the Iraqi insurgent in Mosul who nearly killed him with a rocket-propelled grenade. “Maybe it isn’t that it’s so difficult coming home,” Turner writes, “but that home isn’t a big enough space for all that I must bring to it. America, vast and laid out from one ocean to another, is not a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home. And even if it could—it doesn’t want to.”

The best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America’s recent wars is Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” (Penguin Press), a masterly collection of short stories about war and its psychological consequences. “Redeployment” is military for “return,” and Klay’s fiction peels back every pretty falsehood and self-delusion in the encounter between veterans and the people for whom they supposedly fought. In the title story, which opens the book, the unnamed narrator, back from Iraq, spots his wife in the waiting crowd, dressed to please him but looking somehow unfamiliar: “I moved in and kissed her. I figured that was what I was supposed to do.” In “Bodies,” a marine whose job was in Mortuary Affairs—“processing” the corpses of Americans and Iraqis alike—says, “It was another three weeks before I got home and everybody thanked me for my service. Nobody seemed to know exactly what they were thanking me for.” He visits a former girlfriend, but the war now lies between them: she doesn’t want him, and he can’t tell her the story that’s on his mind, “about the worst burn case we ever had.” Instead, he gives a drunken version to a man he meets in a bar later that night. When he finishes, the man says, “I respect what you’ve been through.” The story goes on:

I took a sip of my beer. “I don’t want you to respect what I’ve been through,” I said.

That confused him. “What do you want?” he said.

I didn’t know. We sat and drank beer for a bit.

“I want you to be disgusted,” I said.

In “Psychological Operations,” the narrator is an Iraq vet of Coptic Christian descent who enrolls at Amherst. He takes a combative interest in an outspoken black classmate—a new convert to Islam—and almost courts her dislike by telling her how he once broadcast sexual insults over loudspeakers to compel insurgents in Falluja out of their houses so that other marines could shoot them. It’s part confession, part argument, part seduction. He can’t decide how he wants the girl to feel about him:



Klay, a Dartmouth grad who served in the Marine Corps in Anbar Province during the violent months of the surge, in 2007, is a writer who happened to be a marine—you can imagine him writing well about anything, not just Iraq. His fiction is extremely funny and absolutely serious, his control over language and character so assured that the array of first-person narrators in these dozen stories—combat grunts, a desk-bound officer, a beleaguered State Department official, a Marine chaplain—are all distinct and persuasive. Klay writes with a powerful restraint about the inversion of normal reality called combat, its permanent effects on bodies and souls, but the best stories in “Redeployment” look at war from a slight distance. The narrator in “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound,” a battalion adjutant, has the inglorious job of writing up the heroics of other marines being nominated for medals. He feels like a real marine only when he returns home and becomes a civilian again—he keeps his hair short so that people will know. (Vietnam vets grew their hair long to blend in.) He meets a woman at N.Y.U. who assumes that he has post-traumatic stress disorder: “I don’t have PTSD, but I guess her thinking that I did is part of the weird pedestal vets are on now. Either way, I didn’t contradict her.” Just as soldiers could never write about glory and sacrifice in the old way after the First World War, the current generation can be ironic about the image of the psychologically damaged vet introduced into the culture with fear and reverence by Vietnam.

The adjutant is one among many troops—their numbers grew over time—who spent their war almost entirely within the confines of an American base. They were known, derisively, as Fobbits, from Forward Operating Base (a satirical novel of that title by a former Army journalist named David Abrams came out in 2012), and they have a relation to combat troops similar to that of civilians to all veterans—the guilt, the awe, the envy, the relief. Back home, the adjutant finds that he misses not Iraq itself but “the idea of Iraq all my civilian friends imagine when they say the word, an Iraq filled with honor and violence, an Iraq I can’t help feeling I should have experienced but didn’t through my own stupid fault.” Klay, who was a public-affairs officer in Anbar—a relatively safe job in a very dangerous place—sounds this minor chord across several stories, with the rigorous honesty that characterizes all his work and is the source of much of its humor and its sadness.

The most morally complex story in “Redeployment,” and perhaps the best, is “Prayer in the Furnace,” about a Marine chaplain in Ramadi who begins to pick up signs that the infantrymen in his combat-weary battalion, led by a hyper-aggressive commander, are committing war crimes. A corporal named Rodriguez, violent and despairing, brings hints, but when the chaplain presses him for details Rodriguez lets him know that he lacks the street cred to understand. “How can you say this place ain’t evil?” the corporal asks. “Have you been out there?” Klay shows sure command of his craft in tracing the chaplain’s anguish as it becomes a crisis of faith. The chaplain writes in his journal:

I see mostly normal men, trying to do good, beaten down by horror, by their inability to quell their own rages, by their masculine posturing and their so-called hardness, their desire to be tougher, and therefore crueler, than their circumstance.

And yet, I have this sense that this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialist home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults. At least here, Rodriguez has the decency to worry about hell.

Torn between awareness of sin and compassion, the chaplain holds Sunday Mass on the base for a handful of marines and tries to break through his inability to minister to them in extremis. He begins his sermon by asking, “Who here thinks that when you get back to the States no civilians will be able to understand what you’ve gone through?” Hands go up. Then he tells three stories. One is about an American parishioner who watched his child waste away with cancer, then angrily refused the chaplain’s glib attempt at comfort. One is about an Iraqi father who brought his badly burned daughter to the base for medical help, then told the chaplain of his hatred of the Americans for humiliating him in front of his family. The third is about Wilfred Owen, gassed in the trenches. “We are part of a long tradition of suffering,” the chaplain tells the listening marines, some of them uneasy, some angry. “We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. Consider Owen. Consider that Iraqi father and that American father. Consider their children. Do not suffer alone. Offer suffering up to God, respect your fellow man, and perhaps the sheer awfulness of this place will become a little more tolerable.”

The sermon fails to move the marines. It’s too soon, and Ramadi is too terrible. There will be more combat deaths, and then, after redeployment, a rash of suicides. The story can end only in irony: the chaplain alludes to Christ’s Passion, and Rodriguez spits in the grass. Some of the men will remain alone for years, perhaps their whole lives. But some will begin to recognize their own suffering in the stories of others. That’s what literature does. 

George Packer became a staff writer in 2003.

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