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FYI -- short piece in Vanity Fair. Redeployment is next on my reading list,
supposed to be excellent.
The Words of War

Maurice Decaul, Phil Klay, Elliot Ackerman, Kevin Powers, Brandon Willitts,
and Matt Gallagher, at the White Horse Tavern, in Greenwich Village.
By Lea Carpenter <http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/lea-carpenter>
inShare

‘Never such innocence again,” Philip Larkin wrote in “MCMXIV,” his iconic
poem about World War I. The Great War changed many things and left legacies
such as indirect fire, automatic weapons, a renewed German will. It also
changed literary tradition, leaving modernism rising in its wake. A select
set of writers who emerged from that conflict became celebrated for their
gift of turning slaughter into poetry and prose. Now, a century on, there’s
an elegant echo: a new literature emerging from a new fight. Like their
predecessors, these men are veterans, some having served multiple tours in
Iraq and Afghanistan over multiple years. They grew up in war, so it’s no
shock they’ve decided to try to understand what it means. Homer said of war
that “it would take a god to tell the tale,” though of course it only takes
a writer with God-given gifts. Here are six. They know one another. They
know the canon to which they are contributing. And they respect, but don’t
mimic, their stylistic elders, from Wilfred Owen to Ernest Hemingway to
Michael Herr. Though, as one of them, Elliot Ackerman, slyly puts it, “it
might have been better to be part of the Lost Generation than the lost part
of a generation.”

Kevin Powers served with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Tom Wolfe called his debut
novel, *The Yellow Birds,* an “*All Quiet on the Western Front* of
America’s Arab wars,” and his first poetry collection was published this
spring. Brandon Willitts, a navy veteran, co-founded Words After War to
link veteran and civilian writers working on the topic of conflict. Matt
Gallagher’s memoir, *Kaboom,* chronicled his time in the armored cavalry in
Iraq, and Atria will publish his novel, *Young Blood,* in 2016. Maurice
Decaul enlisted in the Marines at 17 and is a poet, essayist, and
playwright. Ackerman served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine
special operator, was awarded a Silver Star, and writes about the Syrian
civil war from Istanbul; his first novel, *Green on Blue,* will be
published in 2015. And Phil Klay, a Marine public-affairs officer,
published his debut story collection, *Redeployment,* last spring; war
correspondent Dexter Filkins described it as “the best thing written so far
on what the war did to people’s souls.” On November 19, it won the National
Book Award.

A desire to write, like a desire to serve, is idealistic. Desires and
ideals are worn lightly in this group, yet the guys are confident; they
don’t need their armor anymore.


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Alexander Snyder Mackler
(302) 598-867