War Narratives

Abstract

WHILE THE US-LED WARS in Afghanistan and Iraq have been going on for fourteen years, much of American literature from these conflicts is only now emerging. I appreciate the veterans who’ve woven the simultaneously “worst and best days of their lives” into literature. They have turned to all forms to find their truth—poetry, short stories, memoir, and the novel. (Disclosure: I’m the mother of a Marine who served in both conflicts and is now one of the novelists listed here.) I have framed these suggested readings with a history from the Great War a hundredyearsagoandwithadiaryofoneof the long-serving detainees in Guantánamo. Truth in literature is determined in part by point of view. In these books, the reader can take a journey from many perspectives. Margaret MacMillan The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 Random House In this nonfiction book, Margaret MacMillan narrates history through the lives of those responsible for World War I. The characters and cousins could populate a fiction collection with their dramas, imaginations, and absurdities .MacMillanoffersaninsideview,revealing the people and stories behind the politics and events that led to a war many feel—and felt at the time—shouldn’t have happened. Brian Turner My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir W. W. Norton The author writes of his deployment as an Army sergeant, beginning in the US learning to identify body parts, watching combat on television, and then arriving in Iraq and facing real combat in the first Stryker brigade. “We rode on a war elephant made of steel,” he writes of the nineteen-ton tank. A poet (Here, Bullet), Turner narrates his experiences and his return home in a poet’s language, which spins the harshest circumstances—the soggy, trodden straw—into gold and art. Phil Klay Redeployment Penguin A veteran of the US Marine Corps assembles a dozen short stories and first-person narrators —soldiers on the front lines, in the rear, at desks, with their family, friends, wives, and girlfriends back home. The narrators’ voices are witty, unflinching, nostalgic, and the stories make the reader laugh, cry, and wonder how a generation honed on this conflict will return to life as it was. Elliot Ackerman Green on Blue Scribner This novel narrates the war in Afghanistan from the point of view of an Afghan orphan who gets caught up on the American side of the conflict in order to keep his brother alive. He quickly learns that the war has too many sides and so many points of view that truth shimmers only in the eyes of the beholder. Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Larry Siems, ed.) Guantánamo Diary Little, Brown Guantánamo Diary tells the story of the “war on terror” from the point of view of one who has been detained, tortured, and continues to proclaim his innocence. With a literary and humane voice, Slahi, edited beautifully by Siems and redacted by a censor , renders the horror and humanity in this war that will not end. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels. A vice president of PEN International, she also serves on the boards of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Poets & Writers, the International Center for Journalists, and Words Without Borders. 6 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 what to read now War Narratives by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman Notebook The war has too many sides and so many points of view that truth shimmers only in the eyes of the beholder. ...