War Narratives #1: Truth and Fiction
The notion that the truth about combat cannot be described in a book goes back to the American Civil War, at least.
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Iraq
68 posts
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Tom Sleigh
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tom Sleigh about his new book, Station Zed,, how reportage and the surreal can combine inside a poem, and secularizing the mysteries of death, redemption, and resurrection.
The Rumpus Interview with Brian Turner
Brian Turner discusses his new memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, the Iraq War, poetry and prose, and his family's long history of serving in the military.
This Week in Short Fiction
On Wednesday evening, Phil Klay’s Redeployment won the National Book Award for fiction, making it the first short story collection to win the award since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever in…
Bedrooms of the Fallen by Ashley Gilbertson
I lost my photo. Part of it, anyway. I lost some of the painless pride of ownership, the selfish satisfaction of creation.
ISIS: A Rumpus Roundup
The Islamic State of Iraq in Syria, known better as ISIS, has operated in Syria and Iraq since 2003 as an offshoot of al-Qaeda—at least until al-Qaeda disavowed any connection.…
The Rumpus Interview with Nathan Deuel
Nathan Deuel discussees his collection of essays, Friday Was The Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East, and his attempts to encapsulate cultures so often misunderstood and misrepresented by American media.
X. My Soldier, Iraq, and Contract Marriage
The incinerator burned amputated body parts. It sat immediately next to the barracks in Baghdad.
First-Class Guilt
But I had deployed only once to Iraq. When so many others, including friends of mine, had suffered two, three, four, five, or more deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, why should I be the one enjoying the comfort of flying first-class?
Black Wings: Love, Loss and Life as a Humanitarian Aid Worker in Iraq
It was a cool, blue morning in Baghdad. I stood in the rubble of a bombed out building, a shell of what it had once been.
The Rumpus Unreview: Known and Unknown, by Donald Rumsfeld
An 800-page memoir from the former Secretary of Defense tells an old, familiar story—so familiar that our reviewer didn’t even have to read it.
Fission Accomplished
A collection of linked stories set at Fort Hood convey the loneliness and strain experienced by military families.