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The Long War Forever: Jesse Goolsby’s I’d Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them I’d Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them, Jesse Goolsby’s soon-to-be-released novel about three US Army male soldiers bound by shared horrific experience in Afghanistan, offers plenty of reaso…

"But a mark of Goolsby’s skill is that he refuses to blame military service or war single-mindedly on the troubles that befall Wintric, Torres, and Big Dax. Those things are catalysts, certainly, but it’s more than that." From April 23, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/04/23/t...

Minnesota Turn-and-Burn: War Writing at AWP15 A “turn-and-burn” military convoy travels from one base to another, executes its business quickly, and then immediately returns home; the mission doesn’t allow for socializing or enjoying the desti…

"Taking matters into his own hands, Benjamin Busch recruited an all-star line-up of war authors—Schultz, Fallon, Brian Turner, and Phil Klay—for a panel titled “Telling Our New War Stories: Witness and Imagination across Literary Genres.” From April 18, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/04/18/m...

The Ever-Changing War Lit Scene Two weeks ago I was invited to read fiction on stage in a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar called Pete’s Candy Store. Pete’s often hosts readings, but only once a year dedicates a night to veteran writi…

"This year’s event was hosted by Kaboom author and Words After War mainstay Matt Gallagher, who had many nice things to say about me and my fellow readers Paul Wolfe, Teresa Fazio, and Brandon Willitts." From April 12, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/04/12/t...

Comp Lit, ComiCon, and Contemporary Iraqi War Fiction At the American Comparative Literature Conference last week in Seattle, I participated in a seminar titled “What Does War Look Like? Visual Trauma and Representation.” Organized by Brenda Sanfilipp…

"Specifically, Masmoudi examined representations in recent Iraqi fiction of American “camps,” or what we call more often a FOB: armed enclaves of foreigners that spread parasite-like across the country in the 2000s after the American invasion." From April 4, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/04/04/c...

Sailing the 4Cs: Veteran Literary Organizations and the Composition Classroom The Conference on College Composition and Communication is a big deal for English 101 teachers. Imagine 10,000 strong of us—for I am one—descending on a town near you and geeking out to presentatio…

"Words After War—a New York City literary organization notable for its rapid rise to prominence, built on a sensibility deeply connected to its New York City location and an expanded sense of what a community writing group might do and be." From April 3, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/04/03/s...

Time Now Live and Coming to a Town Near You Last week I presented twice at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, Florida. One presentation was part of a panel called Community Writing Programs for Veterans; my con…

"I’m moderating a panel titled 'Who Can’t Handle the Truth? Memoirs by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans' that features Ron Capps, Kayla Williams, and Colin D. Halloran." From March 25, 2015. //acolytesofwar.com/2015/03/25/time-now-live-and-coming-to-a-town-near-you/

A Yik Yak Prose-Poem, Found Near Fayetteville, NC, Outside Fort Bragg, Home of the 82nd Airborne Division First Yak: Appreciation Yak: Only thing I like about Fayetteville is all the eye candy. Military men are the best men. I’m in heaven every time I come home from school. Subsequent Yaks: I’m the opp…

"Appreciation Yak: Only thing I like about Fayetteville is all the eye candy. Military men are the best men. I’m in heaven every time I come home from school." March 14, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/03/14/a...

The Wild, Wild East: Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue USMC veteran Elliot Ackerman’s novel Green on Blue describes events that ring true to my own deployment experience in east Afghanistan. As an advisor who daily spent hours in the company of Afghans…

"Through the audacity of its imaginative reach, as well as the acuity of its insight into what war in Afghanistan is about, Green on Blue significantly expands the borders of contemporary war literature." From March 10, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/03/10/t...

How We Were: Maurice Decaul’s Stage Vision of Iraq, 2003 Sitting in the audience before Poetic Theater’s production of playwright Maurice Decaul’s Dijla Wal Furat: Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, I mused that the last year or so has not brought man…

"The mortar and ghost scenes showed Decaul the master of two trains of stagecraft—representational fidelity to real life heightened aesthetically and the magical permutation of real life in the pursuit of greater artistic truth." From March 1, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/03/01/h...

Life During Wartime, On the Other Side: Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden Ex-Marine Elliott Ackerman’s novel Green on Blue is out this week and I’m eager to read it. Green on Blue’s point-of-view—it’s told through the eyes of an Afghan young man who serves in a native mi…

"His portrait of the Koran-saturated belief systems and ways of life of contemporary Pakistanis is a badly-needed detailed representation of a world Americans basically spent a decade fighting without knowing much about." From Feb 20, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/02/20/l...

I loved writing posts about music; I'm as much a frustrated rock critic as anything else!

War Songs: Daniel Somers While researching music made by service members in Iraq and Afghanistan and veterans upon their return, I learned of the death by suicide two weeks ago of Daniel Somers. Somers was an Army intellig…

Here's another post where I explored GWOT soldiers' search for new sounds and voices, rather than the rock classics (though we listened to plenty of them, too): acolytesofwar.com/2013/06/29/w...

Never Trust an Officer Over 30? Elizabeth Samet’s No Man’s Land In No Man’s Land, Elizabeth Samet attempts to construct, or re-construct, a personal narrative that makes sense of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, particularly as they have colored her relationship …

"As a recently retired faculty member at West Point... I can attest to Samet's commitment to using her course as a laboratory for change on behalf of an Army otherwise capable of only clunky efforts at self-critique and transformation." From Feb 14, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/02/14/n...

Where Have All The War Songs Gone? Literary historians tell us that during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II odes, ballads, and other popular and folk forms of expression related to the wars often appeared in newspapers, …

"All of which is funny, because music remains vitally important in the lived lives of soldiers at war. Every soldier since 2001 I’m thinking has gone to war with a playback device full of songs and their heads full of many more." From Feb 7, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/02/07/w...

The photograph by my friend Bill Putnam wonderfully enhances the discussion of whether American soldiers (or the American soldiers portrayed in GWOT fiction) are "trauma heroes."

Roy Scranton, Phil Klay, and the American Trauma Hero Roy Scranton set the war writer community abuzz this week when the Los Angeles Review of Books published his essay  “The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to “Redeployment” to Americ…

"Some of us like Scranton all the more for who he is, but, skipping past inside-war-writer-circle dramatics, what about the charges Scranton levies against war narrative?" From Feb 1, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/02/01/r...

This post also contains Time Now's first mention of Roy Scranton's LARB "Trauma Hero" article--by far the most important GWOT war-writing journalism/criticism piece.

Phil Klay’s Redeployment Redux On Tuesday 27 January at 4pm EST, I’ll participate in a Twitter bookchat sponsored by US Studies Online, an offshoot of the British American Studies Association. Our subject will be Phil Klay’s Red…

"I know both DeRosa and Deer and their work and am excited to enter the brave new world of Twitter scholarship with them." Jan 25, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/25/p...

Don’t Kill the Messenger: Oren Moverman’s Ode to Casualty Notification Officers The Messenger, director Oren Moverman’s debut film after a successful screenwriting career, opened in 2009 to critical acclaim but limited popular success. It garnered two Academy Award nominations…

"Too harrowing for comfortable watching in the living room and hardly the stuff that would inspire a fun night out at the movies, The Messenger seems better suited for stage drama than cinematic entertainment." From Jan 16, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/16/d...

Bonus quote: "The role Special Operations played in Iraq and Afghanistan is, we know, “hotly debated,” to use a cliché of student writing."

Grillin’ Chillin’ and Killin’ with the Military 1%: Aaron Gwyn’s Wynne’s War Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days and Aaron Gwyn’s Wynne’s War are the first two contemporary novels to portray United States Special Operations forces at work in the post-9/11 wars. As it happens, both …

"From this point, about halfway through the novel, to the end, the narrative is a pure rush of story-telling bravado, energy, and skill." From January 11, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/11/g...

The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in Fiction, Poetry, Memoir, Film, and Photography: A Compendium Below I’ve catalogued memoirs, imaginative literature, and big-budget films published or released through the end of 2014 that represent important and interesting takes on America’s twenty-first ce…

"The lists are subjective and idiosyncratic, not complete or authoritative. Still, they might help all interested in the subject to more clearly and widely view the fields of contemporary war literature and film." From January 5, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/05/t...

War Lit 2014: Where It’s Been, Where It’s Going On Christmas, the New York Times published two articles on contemporary war literature by Michiko Kakutani, the paper’s premier book critic. One article, titled “A Reading List of Modern War …

"But Kakutani is right on the money by asserting that the all-volunteer military and the civil-military chasm have been huge abiding concerns in the American war effort and the literature written about it." From December 27, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/12/27/w...

War Lit 2014: Here Here! But What’s the There There? Here here to war lit 2014, a year that brought us Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, and Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country, among many excellent others. The …

"Time will tell what recent events mean in terms of American soldier boots on the ground, but the wars now seem to burn more hotly in the nation’s literary imagination than they ever did in its political awareness." From December 21, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/12/21/w...

Tim O’Brien’s “Story Truth” and “Happening Truth” in the Contemporary War Novel Do war stories need militarily-accurate detail to be compelling? Lots of contemporary war fiction bandies the author’s familiarity with up-to-the-minute jargon, gear, and nomenclature, as if the st…

"For O’Brien, realistic description is only a secondary attribute of fiction, one bound to eventually bore the reader unless the tale starts tickling the fancy through its artistic and fanciful rendering, or even contorting, of reality." From December 7, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/12/07/t...

Iraq by the Numbers: On the Road with Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives Michael Pitre’s Iraq War novel Fives and Twenty-Fives blends elements of Roxana Robinson’s Sparta and Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch. Similar to Sparta, Fives and Twenty-Fives features a disa…

"...the characteristic experience of combat for most in Iraq and Afghanistan was not battle on a combat outpost, a midnight raid, or a helicopter air assault. Rather, it was the “CONOP,” or convoy operation..." From November 30, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/11/30/i...

The Great War and Modern Memory: Paul Fussell Reconsidered At the bottom of this post is a video of the group reading at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn I moderated on Veterans Day. Below I’ve named my fellow readers, all veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan wh…

"An obvious first link between Great War authors and contemporary war authors is the essential literariness of the effort to understand military experience." From November 23, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/11/23/t...

Brooklyn, the War Lit Capital of the 21st Century My title alludes to an essay titled “Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century” by Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish writer well-known to those who have studied literature, history, or the arts i…

"Brooklyn sets the tone and pace of the contemporary war writing scene, too, with veteran and interested non-veteran authors by the dozens tapping into Brooklyn’s vitality in hopes of infusing their writing with urgency and relevance." From November 16, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/11/16/b...

Dodge (War) Poetry Festival 2014 War subjects and themes were the focus of this year’s Dodge Poetry Festival, the nation’s largest celebration of poetry, held annually in Newark, New Jersey. The marquee event was a contemporary wa…

"A highlight for me was meeting Robert Pinsky for the first time since I took a class from him almost 30 years ago, when, fed up with graduate school, I asked him to write a letter of recommendation for my application to Officer Candidate School." From Oct 29, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/10/29/d...

“Tomorrow the War Will Have a Picnic”: Global Perspectives on the Global War on Terrorism “Tomorrow the War Will Have a Picnic” is a poem written by an Iraqi author named Abdul Razaq Al-Rubaiee on the eve of the American invasion in 2003.  It and other poems written by Iraqi…

Pakistani-British author Nadeem Aslam: "And so I copied out the whole of Moby-Dick by hand. I copied out the whole of As I Lay Dying by Faulkner by hand. I copied out Lolita. I copied out Beloved...." October 19, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/10/19/t...