Late last night I explained why I thought that Nancy Sherman’s Afterwar was an important non-fiction entry in the still-not-large-enough canon of works explaining our modern chickenhawk-era culture of war. I named a few related works, and this morning I find reminders from readers of others that certainly deserve mention too:
- God Is Not Here: A Soldier’s Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War, by Bill Russell Edmonds. In Iraq Edmonds was an officer supervising prisoner-interrogation. His memoir is about the weight of that experience on the prisoners, and on him. When it appeared this past spring I wrote about why I thought it was important, brave, and admirable. A news story about one of Edmonds’s recent talks is here.
- Consequence magazine. Consequence describes itself as an “international literary magazine focusing on the culture of war.” I am chagrined to say that I had not known about it, but at least I do now. A few days ago it published a review of God is Not Here, by Bob Shea.
- The HBO one-season series Generation Kill, which I know about but have not seen. I thought the original book Generation Kill, by Evan Wright, was very good.
- The FX one-season series Over There, which I saw when it originally aired ten years ago and also admired. Its possible that it was too ahead-of-its-time, for a mainstream audience, in its darkish view of the Iraq invasion and the aftereffects.
- Restrepo, a powerful documentary film by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington that follows a U.S. unit through a year in Afghanistan. The film came out in 2010; a year later, Hetherington was killed while covering the Libyan civil war.
- One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick. Fick was a young Marine Corps officer during the invasion of Iraq and also fought in Afghanistan. His book was one of the earliest notable memoirs of the war.
I know there are more, but that will hold us for now. Thanks for the reminders and tips.
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Update The video of the Georgetown session is now online. You can find it here, or in embedded version in my preceding post.