NEW YORK: Journalists, generals, historians, Iraqis and a former hostage have told their stories about Iraq, but now more than two years after American troops invaded, the flood of books by US soldiers has arrived.
From Roman emperor Julius Caesar to the First World War poets, soldiers have written books, poems, diaries and letters home.
But with titles like The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, and Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the US Army, the latest crop of books offer a more immediate picture of a soldier’s wartime life than ever before.
Two books that will be published in October began as blogs — Internet diaries of writers in Iraq that by their very immediacy can lack the perspective that comes with time.
“If I had to write this book today, from scratch, it would probably be a completely different book,” said Jason Christopher Hartley, whose book Just Another Soldier (to be published on Oct. 4 from HarperCollins) was built around a blog of the same name.
“The military wasn’t a big fan of it,” said Hartley, who was ordered to take down the blog and was confined to base toward the end of his deployment to Iraq with the National Guard.
Hartley describes how he stewed for weeks over an incident in which US troops mistakenly opened fire on a truck carrying a family of Iraqis, killing a man, two women and a three-year-old girl.
Hartley said his editors were worried that readers might not understand the ‘gallows humour’ used commonly by soldiers to cope with tragedy.
Sitting in an ambush position on Sept. 11, 2004, he remembers responding with the National Guard to the World Trade Centre attacks three years earlier, and he muses on his role.
“I am not a pacifist nor am I a conscientious objector, but I believe there must be a way to be an infantryman and still be able to preserve a sense of compassion,” he writes.
“I have tried my best to be honest with myself about my apparently instinctual desire to fight and commit violence, but I also feel unafraid to express my innate desire to bring comfort to those around me.”—Reuters
