One man’s war through 45 objects

Attempts by soldiers themselves to describe to us our 21st-century wars have come, so far, in a few recognisable varieties: the movie-ready tactical accounts narrated by infallible tough guys, grading into versions of what one Iraq war veteran-writer, Roy Scranton, has termed the ‘myth of the trauma hero’: those dramas of personal suffering that ignore, or even presumptively redeem, a war’s wider consequences. Certain more or less lachrymose recent Navy Seal memoirs, for example, have synthesised these two modes; more gifted introspections like Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, with its callowly incontinent lyricism (‘fires on the hillsides… like a tattered quilt of fallen stars’), take the second as far as it can go. Whether these accounts are offered as true stories (dramatised) or novels (heavily autobiographical) is mostly irrelevant when their currency is always the same: the authors’ preciously rare and exotic experience of ‘the real thing’.

It’s tempting to relate the way a veteran writes to how he identifies himself: whether he’s still a soldier, after the fact, still belonging to the cohort, or how thoroughly that incarnation has been superseded by writerhood. The books all describe some degree of identity crisis upon returning to civilian life. Some resolve with the author settling down as a reconfigured quasi-soldier, among the shadow ranks of the erstwhile. In others, a dubious poetry of growth points permanently away from any military ethos, if not from the experiences themselves. Meanwhile, there is a small upper echelon: in Scranton’s writing, or Phil Klay’s outstanding Redeployment, an ironic distance has been achieved, not just from the war itself but from the questions it leaves behind.