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“Fire and Forget,” by Roy Scranton, Matt Gallagher, Colum McCann, and others
“It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us,” novelist Colum McCann writes in the foreword for Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton’s new...
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My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner
If you have ever had the opportunity to hear Brian Turner read his poetry in front of a live audience, you might have noticed a technique he uses. Between incredibly serious poems like “Here, Bullet,”...
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War Narratives #1: Truth and Fiction
The notion that the truth about combat cannot be described in a book goes back to the American Civil War, at least. “The real war will never get in the books,” wrote Walt Whitman. “In the mushy...
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War Narratives #2: Trauma Writing
Wartime trauma is a difficult subject to tackle in literature. Some writers don’t discuss it because they never experienced war personally; others dismiss “trauma writing” as something merely heals the...
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War Narratives #3: The Rumpus Interview with Matt Gallagher
Matt Gallagher has quickly established himself as one of the most distinct and distinguished literary figures coming out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A veteran of a 15-month tour in Iraq during...
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War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians
James Webb’s classic novel Fields of Fire opens with short vignettes of the lives of his characters as civilians—before Marine Corps boot camp, before they went off to war. This brief glimpse of their...
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War Narratives #5: Surge
We are in the middle of a presidential campaign, and the rise of ISIS is allowing presidential candidates to describe the last decade of military engagement in the Middle East in ways that place blame...
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War Narratives #6: The Rumpus Interview with Phil Klay
In 2014, Phil Klay published Redeployment, his collection of short stories set in and about the war in Iraq. Each of the twelve short stories looks at the war from a different perspective. Together...
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War Narratives #7: Turning a Corner
I spent Memorial Day weekend with some friends who I served in Iraq with in 2004. It wasn’t the first time we had gotten together, but it was the first time I noticed that we had started to turn a few...
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War Narratives #8: Flashes of War by Katey Schultz
Although it is written by someone who has never served in the military or been to the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, Katey Schultz’s collection Flashes of War (Apprentice House, 2013) provides...
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