Soldiers
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Red Dawn
But perhaps we were like people everywhere, trying to find some meaning in our existence, and an outside threat gave us both meaning and existence.
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War Narratives #2: Trauma Writing
[I]f we don’t explore wartime trauma in literature, we will never understand war’s impact in personal or social terms; never understand the incredible variety of responses to trauma, with all its nuances and exceptions.
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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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Rapid Fire
Stanton re-gathered himself, still wearing a smile after being shot in the face, and went back to work.
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Survivors
The history of the whole world can be told as the stories of conquerors and the conquered—the former consumed with thoughts of destiny and tyranny, the latter knowing only the persistence of time and the pure grit of bodies.
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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.
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Who Has the Right to Our Stories?
At the New York Times, novelist Roxana Robinson considers the criticism fiction writers receive when they write stories far from their own experience. Some people ask, “Do novelists have the right to write stories that aren’t their own?” Can someone…
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X. My Soldier, Iraq, and Contract Marriage
The incinerator burned amputated body parts. It sat immediately next to the barracks in Baghdad.
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Why I Chose Bangalore by Kerry James Evans for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
I wasn’t thinking about the Syrian Civil War and the US’s possible involvement in it when I chose Kerry James Evans’s debut collection, Bangalore , for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
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A Soldier’s Handbook
The New York Review of Books covers the recently published guidebook given to American soldiers before heading to Vietnam: “Most American soldiers landing in Vietnam in the 1960s were handed a ninety-three-page booklet called A Pocket Guide to Vietnam. Produced by the Department…