The well-written war

Says the teaser line on the New York Times website: 'A new group of soldier-writers explore the futility of war — but wars that they for the most part support.' What's with that but? Well, if you work for the Blue Lady, you just can't believe that a soldier might believe in what he's fighting for.

That said, Elisabeth Bumiller's story is worth a read. I too have been astonished at the literary outpourings from Iraq and Afghanistan, though most of what I've encountered take the form of blogs and full-length books, and most of the books written by journos, not soldiers. Ms Bumiller zeroes in on a book of poems, the title verse being:

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh,
... because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Not bad! Here, Bullet is available on Amazon.com, and I hope that the NYT story will sell hundreds of copies, if not thousands. Still, I suspect that Norman Mailer and Ulysses Grant, to cite two of the old-time soldier-writers mentioned by Ms Bumiller, also supported the wars that engaged their attention. Perhaps Tim O'Brien did, too, at least for a time. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford