After The Fighting, The Writing

By Lev Grossman

Every war has unintended consequences, and literature is usually one of them. The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have already begotten a shelf of new memoirs by soldiers and embedded journalists, documents that arrive months after the insta-news of cable and the Internet, but hit harder and go deeper.

The medal for perfect timing goes to Chris Mackey, whose The Interrogators (Little, Brown; 484 pages), written with journalist Greg Miller, recounts his experiences in Army intelligence, grilling Arab prisoners in Kandahar. Watching him agonize over the ethics of his techniques provides rare insight into a process that, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, we urgently need to understand. This Man's Army (Gotham; 288 pages), by Andrew Exum, is a candid description of life in an ultra-hard-core Army Ranger unit in Afghanistan's Shah-e-Kot Valley, as well as a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on the philosophy of combat. Next month General Tommy Franks will release American Soldier (HarperCollins; 352 pages), which is said to be a colorful and at times unsparing account of his stint overseeing American and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The publisher is printing a million copies.

Combat has always been a way for young Americans to define themselves as a generation. Rolling Stone's Evan Wright was embedded with a Marine reconnaissance unit, and his Generation Kill (Putnam; 354 pages) is a pungently written combat narrative and a close-range study of a bunch of twentysomething warriors trying to get a handle on who they are. At times they come across as cynical adrenaline junkies: "If the dominant mythology of [Vietnam] turns on a generation's loss of innocence," Wright observes, "these young men entered Iraq predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation." At the same time, their loyalty to one another under fire is touching. Instead of losing innocence in combat, they seem to gain it.

--By Lev Grossman