Their War, Their Words

Until you've driven a humvee on a recon mission wearing nightvision goggles, which is like hitting fastballs with a microscope attached to your forehead, only exponentially harder, because even the slightest mistake, sniper fire or incoming rocket-propelled grenades can kill you and your entire crew; or unless you've sweated through 130-degree heat inside a tank, where bottled water sometimes explodes, spraying plastic shrapnel and scalding liquid in your already dripping face; or until skin falls off your feet in sheets because you've worn the same combat boots, with the same socks, for 10 days, don't pretend to know what American soldiers and Marines are going through in Iraq--unless you're willing to read their stories.

This fall marks a watershed moment in American letters. After spending 30 months and losing more than 1,900 U.S. troops in the war on terror, we're facing a new canon of battle memoirs written immediately after these troops returned home from Iraq, and in some instances during their actual tours. History and a flock of literary critics would argue that this new crop is a bit premature. Yet each of these books offers raw, unfiltered, "boots in the dirt" accounts of the war--from coping with the adrenaline rush that comes with killing people to the sexual politics of combat zones to the complexities of administering medical aid to wounded Iraqi citizens--absent all of the dispassion and disconnect of a journalist's or politician's rendering.

Beyond all the news reports and the president's "Mission Accomplished" theater, if you really want to know what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, then you should make a beeline to your local bookseller. With the immediacy--and brutal honesty--these memoirs offer, they are changing the way war is being reported, and in doing so have the ability to change the public's perceptions about this war as it continues. Perhaps we'll begin to examine the elected officials who are making public policy decisions, but who have never held a gun--only 141 of the 540 members of Congress have ever served in the military--much less the moral burden of pulling the trigger. Perhaps we'll take a hard look at the faces of troops whose caskets are mostly hidden from sight. Perhaps we won't surf so quickly past the evening news toward reality TV when more of them die in roadside bombings in Baghdad. Maybe we'll take their word instead of listening to the pundits and armchair quarterbacks. Maybe. Just maybe.