The new war literature by veterans is largely free of politics and polemics. Photograph by Eros Hoagland / Redux

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell wrote in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” his classic study of the English literature of the First World War. “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.” The ancient verities of honor and glory were still standing in 1914 when England’s soldier-poets marched off to fight in France. Those young men became modern through the experience of trench warfare, if not in the forms they used to describe it. It was Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence who invented literary modernism while sitting out the war. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen—who all fought in the trenches and, in the last two cases, died there—remained tied to the conventions of the nineteenth century while trying to convey the unprecedented horror of industrial warfare, a condition of existence so murderous and absurd that a romantic or heroic attitude became impossible. The essence of modern understanding is irony, Fussell argued, and it was born on the Western Front.

Fussell wasn’t wrong about the Great War, but, in his insistence on its newness, he underestimated the staying power of military myths for each generation. Fussell cited a newspaper story about a London man who killed himself out of concern that he might not be accepted for service in the Great War, and noted, “How can we forbear condescending to the eager lines at the recruiting stations or smiling at news like this.” But in the summer of 1968 Tim O’Brien, a twenty-one-year-old in a small Minnesota town, a liberal supporter of Eugene McCarthy and an opponent of the war in Vietnam, submitted himself for induction into the United States Army. O’Brien couldn’t bring himself “to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world,” he wrote, in “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” his 1973 Vietnam memoir. “It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite—inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.” Was O’Brien’s fear of dishonor entirely different from the impulse that drove a forty-nine-year-old man to throw himself under a van in 1914?

Or from the thinking that led Brian Turner to volunteer for the U.S. Army in 1998 and go on to serve as an infantry team leader in the badlands of northwestern Iraq? “I signed the paper and joined the infantry because at some point in the hero’s life the hero is supposed to say I swear,” Turner writes in his memoir, “My Life as a Foreign Country” (Jonathan Cape), published earlier this year in the United Kingdom and forthcoming from Norton here. “I raised my hand and said the words because I would’ve been ashamed in the years to come if I hadn’t, even if it didn’t make sense, even if nobody I cared about ever thought about it, even if all the veterans in my family never said a word, or even if they did, saying, It’s cool, Brian, it doesn’t mean a thing, believe me, the uniform doesn’t make the man.” Here’s Kevin Powers, who joined the Army out of high school and ended up as a machine gunner in the same region of Iraq as Turner: “I had by then inferred that the military was where a person went to develop the qualities that I had come to admire in my father, my uncle, and both of my grandfathers. The cliché, in my case, was true: I thought that the army would ‘make me a man.’ ” The scare quotes suggest Fussell’s wised-up irony, but they weren’t enough to keep Powers home. Every generation has to discover what Fussell called the “hope abridged” that waits somewhere beyond the recruiting office. For Americans, this experience has been an overwhelmingly male one, recorded in literature written by men, but that will change as women—such as Kayla Williams, the author of two Iraq memoirs—go off to combat zones.

Soldiers who set out to write the story of their war also have to navigate a minefield of clichés: all of them more or less true but open to qualification; many sowed long before the soldiers were ever deployed, because every war is like every other war. That’s one of them. War is hell is another. War begins in illusion and ends in blood and tears. Soldiers go to war for their country’s cause and wind up fighting for one another. Soldiers are dreamers (Sassoon said that). No one returns from war the same person who went. War opens an unbridgeable gap between soldiers and civilians. There’s no truth in war—just each soldier’s experience. “You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (from “How to Tell a True War Story,” in O’Brien’s story collection “The Things They Carried”).

Irony in modern American war literature takes many forms, and all risk the overfamiliarity that transforms style into cliché. They begin with Hemingway’s rejection, in “A Farewell to Arms,” of the high, old language, his insistence on concreteness: “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”

The style of understated disillusionment remains universally recognizable and pervasively influential in war literature. Vietnam gave us another kind of distancing—black humor, satire, surrealism—often in novels that were not set in Vietnam, such as Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” (A similar mood suffuses “M*A*S*H,” a movie that was nominally about the Korean War.) Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam writing—his memoir, the interlocking stories in “The Things They Carried,” and, especially, his novel “Going After Cacciato”—combined Hemingway’s hard and exact prose with often fantastical incidents, suited to a jungle war against an invisible enemy. The characteristic voice of Vietnam literature became the matter-of-fact statement of hallucinatory evil, poised between humor and horror. It’s heard in the opening paragraph of “Going After Cacciato”: “The rain fed fungus that grew in the men’s boots and socks, and their socks rotted, and their feet turned white and soft so that the skin could be scraped off with a fingernail, and Stink Harris woke up screaming one night with a leech on his tongue.”

O’Brien’s work, like the work of other great war writers, makes violence inseparable from pity. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” a soldier loses his best friend to a booby-trapped artillery shell, and, later that day, he machine-guns a baby water buffalo in the cruellest possible way. The narrator reports that whenever he tells this story some kindhearted older woman will urge him to move on. “I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn’t listening. It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.” This isn’t just the soldier’s love for his war buddies, intense as that attachment can be. It’s a redemptive understanding of their capacity for good and evil both, and of the way that war, more than any other human endeavor, leaves them nowhere to hide.