In honor of Veterans Day, head down to your local bookstore and buy a book by a veteran--you won’t be disappointed. If it’s a book on war, you’ll also gain a much better understanding of the complexity of what it’s like to be a soldier or a prisoner of war.
At root, war is a horrible thing. But millions and billions of people get swept into wars and it has, sadly, been a core part of human history. A common theme in war literature is the profound disconnect veterans feel when they return home and sense that the public is oblivious to what they went through.
One way to prevent future wars, no doubt, is to learn the stories of veterans, to understand what they encountered and how they survived. If the world begins to fully appreciate the scope of war, it seems unlikely that it would be waged again.
(This is a list of books that I’ve read, so it’s not comprehensive. No list can truly be comprehensive so let me know what I missed in the comments and I’ll add it to my reading list)
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
The title story in this short story collection tries to convey the weight of the Vietnam War. The physical, emotional and cultural weight on a group of young, mostly naive men who never had any intention of fighting in a war.
What is it like to trudge through a hot, foreign forest under the weight of bulky army equipment as your boots become waterlogged and rashes chafe your body? What about when your friends are dying around you? What about when the memories of your former life are constantly receding from and assaulting your thoughts?
O’Brien achieves this effect by constantly repeating “carried” to describe what the men are carrying, whether physical or psychological.
As the story carries on, the weight becomes nearly unbearable.
In Pharaoh’s Army By Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff should never have been in the Vietnam War. He knows this all too well.
Throughout this memoir, Tobias humorously depicts the absurdity of his time in Vietnam, from watching TV in his guard shack to getting drunk in cities--but this is all ominously shaded as people around him die and war rages.
He’s still a teenager when he enrolls in the army and he carries all his youthful silliness and recklessness with him to Vietnam.
Few writers can make a character so alive in all their uniqueness in so few sentences as Tobias can.
Reading his work is incredibly satisfying. He’s the type of writer that you regard as a friend.
The Yellow Birds By Kevin Powers
This book elegantly explores the disillusionment faced by soldiers of the Iraq War.
Two young friends try to maintain their former identities as they finish their tours. The various missions they get sent on seem pointless. Life in the barracks is boring and very hot. The ease of killing an unknown person from a far distance with a powerful weapon tantalizes them, partly because guilt can be muffled or delayed by war and partly because doing so would jolt their experience.
This aimlessness and depression stays with the protagonist, Bart, as he returns to the US. He can’t stand how all civilians treat him with excessive respect but have no clue, nor desire to know, what he went through.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
This genre-busting satire follows Billy Pilgrim as he bounces through time experiencing World War II and life afterwards.
Vonnegut cleverly conveys the PTSD and mental deterioration of Pilgrim by suggesting that he is a passive traveler randomly appearing in various situations, when, in reality, he’s experiencing life in a linear fashion.
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
How did anyone survive Auschwitz? Primo Levi is baffled by this question years later as he recounts in devastatingly clear (and beautifully written) detail his experience in the Nazi prison camp: all the arbitrary cruelty of withholding food and water and dragging out roll call in sub-zero temperatures and endless beatings and so on.
Despite the barbarity of the situation, human warmth never fully leaves the story as his friends and fellow prisoners try to survive their days.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
This book covers one day--but it feels like 15 years. It’s a potent, bracing testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.
Ivan Denisovich is a prisoner in the Soviet Union’s notorious Gulag prison system in Siberia. Like “Survival in Auschwitz,” every single day of his 10-year sentence is a calculating struggle for sustenance and life. Every ounce of energy has to be monitored. The weather regularly plummets to -50 fahrenheit and the men wear rags and shoes that fall apart as they do arduous manual labor. All the while, additional years are added onto sentences for minor infractions.
In this environment, hoarding a bread crust becomes a life-defining event.
Redeployment by Phil Klay*Next on my reading list*
This book of short stories explores the Iraq War from different perspectives and won the 2014 National Book Award. I’m excited to read it.
Bonus:
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (not a veteran)
War is never straightforward. From the moment it is waged, war splinters in a million directions. People everywhere are sucked into its gravity and all sorts of micro and macro objectives emerge--from forming drug smuggling rings to collecting artifacts to doing everything possible to hide.
The 2007 National Book Award winning “Tree of Smoke” travels along what branches off of the central, chaotic goal of destruction during the Vietnam War.
The results are bizarre, mysterious and always enchanting as the perspective shifts from a CIA official, an infantryman, a US civilian, an NGO worker, a Filipino officer, a Vietcong double agent, a US sergeant, a German assassin and more.
Veterans Day (Or Remembrance Day if you prefer) is a day to honor those who fought in war to make the world a safer, more peaceful place.
You can go to TAKE ACTION NOW to call on world leaders to bring this goal of peace and unity to completion by supporting the Global Goals.