A review of Kimberly K. Dougherty’s Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015 One of war’s most pernicious myths is that new technology will not only hasten its outcome but les...
Peter Molin’s “Strike Through the Mask!”: Memory and Memoir in Afghanistan
The opening of this month’s column repeats much of a Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature post I wrote in 2018. The rest updates and expands upon that post by ref...
New Poetry by Sofiia Tiapkina: “To Forget or Not Maybe,” “Grasping the Sky,” and “Airless Embrace”
to forget or not maybe to forget or not maybe to fight for memory or not i’m here i’m she lying on my back underneath me blue cherries of bruises ten backs all pierced by bullets all r...
New Poetry by Steve Gerson: “Our Prayers”
Our Prayers where are the shields/we need/to stop the blastof bullets Glockand AKassaults?that overwhelm the bluein our veins?that enter our brains ourschools the bodiesof children with unicornback...
New Nonfiction from Michael Gruber: Review of J. Malcolm Garcia’s “Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful: Stories from Afghanistan”
Humanity in Afghanistan For the average American G.I. who served in Afghanistan, the country was of a different world. Most understood Afghans had relatively little in common with us, its would-be ...
New Fiction from Kirsten Eve Beachy: “Soft Target”
For Sallie. By Picture Day in November, Sophie had perfected the downward stab and counting to twenty. She clenched her soft fingers around her rainbow pony pencil, raised her fist high, and then s...
New Fiction from Chris Daly: “The Rothko Report”
“My father’s work takes you to the edge of the abyss and invites you to look.” -Son of Rothko Dateline South Florida, October, 1962: It was Monday 2:00pm EST when Sister Linu...
Peter Molin’s “Strike Through the Mask!”: Interment at Arlington
The vet read that the hero’s burial ceremony in Arlington Cemetery was taking place the following Tuesday. As it happened, the vet was going to be in Arlington, the county in Virginia, that day and...
New Poetry by Luis Rosa Valentin: “Desperate Need of Help”
Desperate Need of Help
...
New Poetry by Jennifer Smith: “So This is My Career?”
New Poem by Jennifer Smith: “So This is My Career”
...
New Fiction from Kate Sullivan: “All Sales Final”
GoodSouthernBoy™ is born to a RegularAmericanFamily! in Tennessee. You won’t learn where exactly, and if you do, you won’t remember. It’s not important. GoodSouthernBoy™ stands over six feet tall, ...
New Fiction by Joe Millsap: Dreamland
Muhamet reaches for a plastic water bottle resting on the metal filing cabinet that serves as a nightstand. He drinks the last of it, tosses the empty bottle to the floor. It’s early, no sunl...
New Nonfiction from F. Ahmeti: Bunker Mentality
“The home of the Albanian belongs to God and the guest.” Kanun Durres reminds me of the Jersey Shore. The mix of family fun and adult nightlife, and the dirt, is not unlike the town featured on the...
New Review by Adrian Bonenberger: John Milas’ “The Militia House”
In the Mind of Madness There is a nightmare I used to have with some regularity even before my time in the military, in which a house from my childhood concealed some horrible and sentient threat b...
Peter Molin’s “Strike Through the Mask!”: The Afterlife of Words and Deeds
A recent Los Angeles Times review of A Line in the Sand, the latest novel by Kevin Powers, the author of seminal Global War on Terror novel The Yellow Birds, proposes that GWOT fiction written by v...
New Poetry by Jim Kraus: “Amphibious”
AMPHIBIOUS In Hokusai’s “Kanagawa Wave,” the boatmen look like a school of masquerading fish about to disappear into the vast trough between waves, the scene a masque for the knowing ...
New Review from Adrian Bonenberger: Jaroslav Hasek’s “The Man Without a Transit Pass and Other Tales”
There are few things I like better than sitting down with a copy of classic Central or Eastern European literature from the 19th century onwards, especially its short fiction. The best authors from...
New Nonfiction from Andrew Davis: Korta Za: Go Home
Andrew Elliot Davis was born July 1, 1990 in Worcester, MA; his family moved to Milford, NH, where he graduated high school in 2008. Although Andrew had a lot of different interests as a young man,...
New Fiction by Pavle Radonic: Murder, War and the Dead
An old unsolved murder mystery in a foreign sea-port. Ship Captain the victim, done nobody any harm. Who killed Captain S. Palori and why? Why was Palori’s mission kept quiet from the populac...
New Fiction from Andrew Snover: Dana and the Pretzelman
The Pretzelman died yesterday. He was shot on his corner half a block from his home, and if he has family they’ll pile stuffed animals, and one of his boys will spray-paint RIP, and someone will ta...
Peter Molin’s “Strike Through the Mask!”: Spotlight on MilSpeak and Middle West Presses
Major publishing house enthusiasm for war, mil, and vet-themed books has noticeably waned in the past few years, but two small presses, MilSpeak Foundation and Middle West Press, have emerged to fi...
Fiction by David Abrams: “Thank You”
Thank you Thank you for your service Thank you for going Thank you for coming back Thank you for not dying Thank you for taking the bullet, the mortar round, the shrapnel that is making its way to ...
New Fiction by Cory Massaro: “Gran Flower”
I fill the big bucket with soap and water and start heading across the field. It’s early on a Sunday and Gran Flower will want his solar cells cleaned, which they say isn’t really necessary,...
New Poetry by Todd Heldt: “This Is A Drill, This Is Only A Drill” and “Suffer The Children”
ACTION IS PRETTY / image by Amalie Flynn This is a drill. This is only a drill. They voted to abolish history. There had been no commercials. We didn’t know which wrong to fear most, a...
New Poetry by Justice Castañeda: “There Will Be No Irish Pennants”
There Will Be No Irish Pennants “Discipline organizes an analytical space.” [1] Field Day & Inspection. Windows shut blinds open half-mast. Sinks will be bleached, faucets are to be poi...
New Review from Larry Abbott: Lauren Kay Johnson’s “The Fine Art of Camouflage”
Camouflage can exist on a number of levels. There is the basic military definition of disguising personnel, equipment, and installations to make them “invisible” to the enemy. There is the i...
New Review from Rachel Kambury: David Chrisinger’s “The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Second World War”
The War of Little Things A review of David Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II “I’ve got something I want you to have,” Grandpa Art told me, apropos of nothin...
New Nonfiction from Laura Hope-Gil: “The Train”
We were staying in the youth hostel in Zermatt at the base of the Matterhorn and on a day trip to see the castle in St. Nicklaus. I was twelve and my sister fourteen. My period started the night be...
Peter Molin’s “Strike Through the Mask!”: American Veterans and the Ukrainian Crisis
Bordentown is a pleasant town located on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River about twenty miles north of Philadelphia. For a small town, Bordentown has seen a fair amount of history and notab...
New Nonfiction by I.S. Berry: “Math and Other Things I Learned from War”
Numbers don’t lie, they say. 2 + 2 = 4. No matter how you rearrange it; no matter how you solve it. Turn it into subtraction (4 – 2 = 2), and it still works. Math’s rules are inviolable, unyielding...
New Poetry by Carol Everett Adams: “Rabbit Trails”
RABBIT TRAILS in the Texas dust. We’re flat in the dirt so we can poke around down there with a long stick, while above us bullets fly and children hold up their honor roll certificat...
New Nonfiction by M.C. Armstrong: “Murder Most Foul: The Role of Lyndon Johnson in the Murder of John F. Kennedy”
What is the truth, and where did it go? Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know. “Shut your mouth, ” said the wise old owl. Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul...
New Fiction from Adrian Bonenberger: “American Fapper 2: Still Fappin’”
I know what you’re thinking. What could this story possibly be about. Let me catch you up. First of all, you’re wondering whether I shot Angela’s kid or Angela. The answer is: I shot neither...
New Fiction by Cam McMillan: “The Colors of the Euphrates”
She came from the south, wearing a bright red dress and carrying a light blue backpack, weaving through the well-worn paths on the banks of the Euphrates that had been carved out by foot traffic an...
Peter Molin’s Strike Through the Mask!: “So Say We All and the Veterans Writing Workshop”
Justin Hudnall, the founder and director of the San Diego-based performative writing-and-reading collective So Say We All, asked me to lead a Zoom writing workshop for veterans and veteran-affiliat...
New Poetry by Corbett Buchly: “Messages from Below”
messages from below the radio signals emanated from the depths commuters puzzled over the whistles and squawks that cut through their favorite programs cryptologists went to work but ...
New Nonfiction from Larry Abbott: Review of Joy Damiani’s “If You Ain’t Cheatin’, You Ain’t Tryin'”
Joy Damiani: If You Ain’t Cheatin’, You Ain’t Tryin’ (and other lessons I learned in the Army) Available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback versions You will hate this book. You will hate being co...
New Nonfiction from Thomas Donovan: “After the War”
There was a heavy snowfall that February night in 1946. A six-year-old boy watched from his bedroom window as the big snowflakes slowly covered everything. The intrusive sounds of my Uncle Ray’s r...
New Fiction from Eddie Freeman: “The Skirt Fetcher”
Sadie was a do-gooder, someone who was aware of the deeply rooted systematic injustices that perpetuated oppression throughout the world, and who wanted to do something meaningful about it. She was...
New Fiction by Bob Kalkreuter: “Unhitched”
He remembered that day. God, did he remember it! His worst day in a year of worst days, a day he’d spent the last six months trying to bury. A day he’d regret for a lifetime, even though he himself...
Peter Molin’s Strike Through the Mask!: A Review of Andrew Bacevich’s “Paths of Dissent”
What did you do if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and believed the wars you volunteered to fight were unethical or badly managed? Keep quiet and perform your duties as best you could? Tak...
New Poetry by Jehanne Dubrow: “Poem for the Reader Who Said My Poems Were Sentimental and Should Engage in a More Complex Moral Reckoning with U.S. Military Actions”; “Epic War Poem”; “Tyrian Purple,” and “Some Final Notes On Odysseus”
When the goddess cries out,
her voice is a mountain against
the fighting. But the old soldier
keeps running—war like weather
in his ears, a summer storm,
in his pulse ...
New Fiction from Jane Snyder: “Mandy Schott”
They sent us home from school early because of the snow, just hard little flakes at first. I didn’t look in the garage for Dave’s car because it was the time when he’d be at work. I went into the r...
New Nonfiction from Antoinette Constable: “A Hundred Roses for Olga Herzen”
To some people outside our circle, Charles Rist was seen as a saintly hero. Charles Rist, our grandfather, was a famous economist, and vice-governor at La Banque de France. He was among the first t...
New Nonfiction from Patrick Hicks: “A Woman’s Place”
Ravensbrück did not fall from the sky. It was planned. It was built. It was managed. The only all-female concentration camp in the Third Reich was so large and complex that no single person—whether...
Peter Molin’s Strike Through the Mask!—Elliot Ackerman’s “The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan” and Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories”
It’s a commonplace that America largely ignored the long war in Afghanistan while it was being fought. Now, after a brief flurry of heightened interest in the 2021 evacuation of Afghan allies...
New Nonfiction from Lauren Kay Johnson: “Inheritance of War” an Excerpt from The Fine Art of Camouflage
I swore I would never become a soldier like my mother. She called it a blip, a few months out of an otherwise enjoyable career with the Army. No one saw the blip coming. Both of my grandfathers ser...
New Poem by Sandra Newton: “Naught”
NAUGHT There is naught to be done for it: We are over As the ocean is over its attraction And is now crawling Back from the shore, Having fucked it thoroughly. We are done Like steak on a grill, Si...
New Nonfiction from Joan Stack Kovach: “What He Wore”
He was always a very sharp dresser. Firstborn child, he toddled around in a merino wool coat from Lord&Taylor and a short pants suit from B Altman that would be handed down to his younger broth...
New Fiction from Michael Loyd Gray: “The Song Remains the Same”
Dalton bought a used F150 in Kalamazoo with oil rig money and drove north to a trailer he owned south of Mancelona. It squatted on ten acres that were his along a creek. It was way out in the booni...