‘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.