"All of which is funny, because music remains vitally important in the lived lives of soldiers at war. Every soldier since 2001 I’m thinking has gone to war with a playback device full of songs and their heads full of many more." From Feb 7, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/02/07/w...

"Some of us like Scranton all the more for who he is, but, skipping past inside-war-writer-circle dramatics, what about the charges Scranton levies against war narrative?" From Feb 1, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/02/01/r...

"I know both DeRosa and Deer and their work and am excited to enter the brave new world of Twitter scholarship with them." Jan 25, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/25/p...

"Too harrowing for comfortable watching in the living room and hardly the stuff that would inspire a fun night out at the movies, The Messenger seems better suited for stage drama than cinematic entertainment." From Jan 16, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/16/d...

"From this point, about halfway through the novel, to the end, the narrative is a pure rush of story-telling bravado, energy, and skill." From January 11, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/11/g...

"The lists are subjective and idiosyncratic, not complete or authoritative. Still, they might help all interested in the subject to more clearly and widely view the fields of contemporary war literature and film." From January 5, 2015. acolytesofwar.com/2015/01/05/t...

"But Kakutani is right on the money by asserting that the all-volunteer military and the civil-military chasm have been huge abiding concerns in the American war effort and the literature written about it." From December 27, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/12/27/w...

"Time will tell what recent events mean in terms of American soldier boots on the ground, but the wars now seem to burn more hotly in the nation’s literary imagination than they ever did in its political awareness." From December 21, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/12/21/w...

"For O’Brien, realistic description is only a secondary attribute of fiction, one bound to eventually bore the reader unless the tale starts tickling the fancy through its artistic and fanciful rendering, or even contorting, of reality." From December 7, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/12/07/t...

"...the characteristic experience of combat for most in Iraq and Afghanistan was not battle on a combat outpost, a midnight raid, or a helicopter air assault. Rather, it was the “CONOP,” or convoy operation..." From November 30, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/11/30/i...

"An obvious first link between Great War authors and contemporary war authors is the essential literariness of the effort to understand military experience." From November 23, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/11/23/t...

"Brooklyn sets the tone and pace of the contemporary war writing scene, too, with veteran and interested non-veteran authors by the dozens tapping into Brooklyn’s vitality in hopes of infusing their writing with urgency and relevance." From November 16, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/11/16/b...

"A highlight for me was meeting Robert Pinsky for the first time since I took a class from him almost 30 years ago, when, fed up with graduate school, I asked him to write a letter of recommendation for my application to Officer Candidate School." From Oct 29, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/10/29/d...

Pakistani-British author Nadeem Aslam: "And so I copied out the whole of Moby-Dick by hand. I copied out the whole of As I Lay Dying by Faulkner by hand. I copied out Lolita. I copied out Beloved...." October 19, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/10/19/t...

Phil Klay in front of the South Gate Tavern, Siobhan Fallon's father's bar in Highland Falls, NY. From October 15, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/10/15/c...

"...Castner wonders why Afghanistan seems to have inspired triumphalist memoirs by Navy SEAL team members and infantry lieutenants, while the literary output of Iraq has been fiction and poetry written by disillusioned enlisted soldiers." From October 11, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/10/11/o...

"Kudos to Flynn for thinking how the resources of literature might be brought to bear on one’s personal narrative, kudos to her for letting us see the shape that marriage to a service member might take." From September 28, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/09/28/w...

"Like Whitman at the end of his own long poem, Turner is somewhere ahead looking out for us while we scramble to catch up." From September 15, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/09/15/r...

"Whatever his thoughts about contractor perfidy and military pathology, the narrator takes the money he earns in Iraq and runs away, as far away as he can get." From August 31, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/08/31/r...

"If Demon Camp isn’t a novel, what is it? Investigative journalism, perhaps, but the haunted prose and Percy’s insertion of herself into the story are just the beginning of its breaches of the tenets of objective reportage." August 24, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/08/24/h...

"The novel, told in alternating short chapters related from the point-of-view of each of the major characters, describes their efforts to understand the allure of revolutionary violence...." From August 7, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/08/17/l...

"The implication here is that post-traumatic stress and other forms of contemporary veteran dysfunction are exacerbated by their victims’ knowledge that at some level they volunteered for and were compensated for what they now suffer." From August 10, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/08/10/w...

"But many or most Flashes of War stories feature American fighting men, of whom one is said, 'Until joining the Army, he never realized that what a man believes could be so far from what a man does.'” From August 2, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/08/02/w...

"So far, stories and novels about the wars have been remarkably dainty about depicting American soldiers’ capacity for killing, torture, carnage, malevolence, and other forms of evil." From July 27, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/07/27/s...

"In the face of competition from faster-moving, quicker-hitting social media forms such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s hard not for blogs to smell a little musty." From July 15, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/07/15/a...

"Collectively and individually, we all went crazy as if plagued by hornets after 9/11, even as we had to make huge decisions with gigantic costs, and we’re not through yet." acolytesofwar.com/2014/07/01/w...

"And if there’s any author in common I’ll bet the majority of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans—to include the veteran writers–-have read it would have to be Rowling." From June 27, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/06/27/j...

"Still proud of their service and eager to remember positive aspects of it, their nostalgic fondness rests uneasily alongside messed-up minds and damaged bodies." From June 25, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/06/25/m...

"...I met a vet author who told me that he had written a draft of a novel based on the Bergdahl saga. For him, Bergdahl’s disappearance represented a contemporary version of Tim O’Brien’s 1978 Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato..." From June 17, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/06/17/t...

"War photojournalism and artistic photography bring to the fore questions about treating violence and suffering as aesthetic subjects. How are we supposed to respond when we view graphic images that seem to glorify or prettify war?" From June 9, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/06/09/o...

The 2025 Col. Darron L. Wright Awards for prose by a service-member-veteran have been announced!!! - 1st Place “Synthetic” by Hannah Morehead - 2nd Place “Wore Down” by David Buchanan - 3rd Place “Receipt at Ogden’s Twist” by Tom Sheehan www.lineofadvance.org

"These poems rang very true for me—for every story I have of bullets whizzing by my head, I have five about crazy vehicle adventures in the Afghanistan mountains and wadis." June 1, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/06/01/w...

"The poems in Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting trace the intertwining processes of remembering, reflecting, and projecting, roughly but not always centered on an awareness of mortality brought to an intensified pitch by combat." From May 26, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/05/26/u...

"The answer to that question is unmistakable: Benedict castigates a misogynist military culture that ruins women’s chances of serving honorably and happily." From May 20, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/05/20/n...

"Bonenberger makes new many already twice-told warfaring episodes while filling in cracks and margins untouched by other memoirs and histories." From May 4, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/05/04/w...

In the audience at the reading was Richard Slotkin, a Wesleyan professor famous for his works Regeneration Through Violence, Gunfighter Nation, and others. The thesis of Regeneration Through Violence is easy to state.... From April 26, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/04/26/w...

"Both read powerfully, both were charming raconteurs in informal discussion, and both were inspirational about the necessity of imagination and art to help people—future Army officers—understand the complexity of war and the human experience of it." April 21, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/04/21/w...

"A tribute to a brother who was killed in Iraq in 2004, the film ends with harrowing audiotape of Grella’s brother speaking from Iraq while gunfire rattles and pounds in the background." From April 12, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/04/12/w...

"Within that stricture and a fairly limited iconographic range—think flags, screaming eagles, and thunderbolts—the murals demonstrated a remarkable competence, color palette, and imaginative variety." From April 10, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/04/10/g...

"Niedringhaus’s killing makes those words foolish, further proof of war’s ability to ruin that which it has touched in ways obvious and in ways we could never anticipate." From April 6, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/04/06/d...

"...real linguists exist by the 1000s in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and letting them fend for themselves now that we are gone is one more of the ways we fought the wars very callously..." From March 28, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/03/28/t...

"In public remarks, Klay discusses a question he’s asked often: 'Had I killed anyone in Iraq?' Klay’s answer is no, but the question informs so many Redeployment stories that it clearly has become a preoccupation." From March 18, 2024. acolytesofwar.com/2014/03/18/a...

"I presented with Phil Klay and Hilary Plum on a panel organized by Roy Scranton. Judging by the size of the crowd and the number and quality of questions we received, we did a pretty good job...." From March 3, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/03/03/t...

"Mariette Kalinowski had read Joyce’s modernist masterpiece in the not-so-distant past. So had Colin Halloran... Brian Castner, it turned out, was auditing a class on Joyce at Niagara University in Buffalo." From March 14, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/03/14/t...

“'I felt that the artillery fire was like a carnival of stars, as we staggered like lovers across the soil of the homeland.'” (Hassan Blasim). From February 23, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/02/23/t...

"The spirit of discovery and reflection may be as good as anything else we’ve got going today in terms of bridging the much-talked-about civil-military divide." From February 22, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/02/22/w...

"No one in either the war or the lit business saw Turner coming–a poet with such skill, imagination, and empathy married with front-line experience, so devoid of amateurish stylistic flourishes or naïve or polemical thinking." From February 15, 2014: acolytesofwar.com/2014/02/15/t...

"Speaking as someone who joined the Army almost solely for the chance to go to Ranger School, I did my own basking in sympathetic admiration for other men who sought out the hardest tests of strength and stamina they could find." From February 9, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/02/09/w...

“'After the reading I was able to speak with another veteran who told me that he related very much to my poetry, and I hope that anyone else, and any other vets and service men and women who read it will also get something from it.'” From February 2, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/02/02/a...

"In the tiny, dark performance space, on a night where temperatures outside hovered in the single digits...the authors spun webs of words that enveloped their listeners in a dreamy snare of story-telling enchantment." From January 25, 2014. acolytesofwar.com/2014/01/25/t...