Introduction: Roy Scranton’s soon-to-be published Total Mobilization: American Literature and World War II expands upon Scranton’s controversial 2015 Los Angeles Review of Book...
“I Like the Real Stuff”—WBT Interviews Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain, the award-winning author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevera, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and, most recently, Beautiful Country Burn Again, was kind enough to invite two WBT edi...
New Fiction from Mike Freedman: KING OF THE MISSISSIPPI
The shine and swagger of a new day. Great Recession? Not Houston. And yet, and yet there had been a speed bump in September 2008, sure, but that had been assessed and corrected; and now the city o...
New Fiction from Steven Kiernan: “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”
For the amputees of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Segways were the new fad. It had become common to see roving gangs of them, upright and speeding across campus and through the hospital, riding in ele...
New Poetry from John Milas
Parade the Beef “I declare this meat tasty and fit for human consumption.” – President of the Mess, CLR-27, Landing Support Company, Camp Lejeune, 2009 we charge our wineglasses to toast the ...
New Fiction from Adrian Bonenberger: “Special Operations World”
No more than 10 percent of the United States military was special operations when I got out. Being in special operations or “specops” as it was known at the time was something to be pro...
Stuck
Ozzy stuck pennies in Huey’s door, wedging it shut, and we all stood in the hallway and laughed as he tried to get out. Serinson and Crater built a wall of beer cans and set it outside Gregg’s door...
No War With Iran
Nearly eighteen years. That is how long America has been at war since the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. Many Americans have forgotten this or have stopped ca...
Japanese Poetry Never Modifies
August 2011 I remember when you first joined, I used to tell you that the Army would be four years, the way that college had been four years, and that really used to help you. These days, I’m not s...
Wrongful Appropriation of the Soul
In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel One: Complicity Every time I read another account of sexual ...
New Poetry by Antonio Addessi
You’d caught
the big one they said, you’d hooked a willow and
sank thigh deep into the muck. They hung up
when I asked if they’d bring you home.
It was late and I had my rol...
A sickness of the soul: remembering Adam and Tim Davis
Correction submitted by Delta Company paratrooper: five, not four, paratroopers died from the IED. “Matthew Taylor died September 27th, 2007 from wounds suffered from the IED. Rogers was kill...
New Poetry by Aidan Gowland
Breathless If you say “I am not a monster” Into the mirror and turn around three times A better version of yourself will start to take root in your heart. If some nights you cannot make your...
New Fiction from Ulf Pike: “Title and Price”
It was not rare to see horses on Main Street when I was growing up in this town. I was spindly and spry then, when distances were calculated by how much jerky and water to pack, when the ide...
Book Review by Eric Chandler: IT’S MY COUNTRY, TOO
This happened in the 1980’s. Maybe it was after I joined the military or before, when I was thinking about it. In either case, I was sitting in a cabin in New Gloucester, Maine with my Aunt Helen a...
New Poetry from Liam Corley
In Which I Serve as Outside Reader on General Petraeus’s Dissertation [The current version of the Army’s Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, originated as a doctoral dissertation writ...
An Interview with Brooke King, author of WAR FLOWER: MY LIFE AFTER IRAQ
Andria Williams: Brooke, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with Wrath-Bearing Tree. We are all excited to feature an excerpt from your debut memoir, War Flower: My Life After Iraq. In a st...
Review of Jon Chopan’s Veterans Crisis Hotline
A few years ago, I had a conversation with a friend named Ted. Ted is a fellow veteran, and classmate of mine from the Air Force Academy who may be forgiven his obsession with Moby Dick. We were pu...
New Fiction: Beethoven and the Beggar
A handsome couple strolled arm in arm down Central Park West. The man, tall and athletic with a thick, well-brushed mane, wore a black, fur-trimmed cloak over an Armani smoking jacket. The lady, sl...
New Nonfiction from Brooke King: “Ghosts” and “The Only Stars I’ve Seen”
Ghosts The young Iraqi girl stared back at me, her face covered over in black; only her eyes shown out from under the cloth. For years the girl I saw in the marketplace haunted me. I used to wonder...
Suicide, the Soldier’s Bane
Here’s how it happens: you get a text. Or you see a cryptic post about the importance of friendship and “reaching out” on Facebook. Or an email. Then, the phone call comes. “Hey man. Don’t know if ...
New Fiction: The Sandbar
The morning of day three, Kelly decided to go out on a jet ski. She’d been resistant at first for all the usual reasons. But the accumulated effect of watching other vacationers roar around on the ...
New Poems by Alex Pitre
Slurry The bones had been surrounded by years of suppression, political amnesia, and walls of loam that contained not much more than clay. Now laid out in some large building on the edge of some to...
New Essay: To Honor a Hero by Claudia Hinz
It’s story time at the base library here at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, San Diego, home to the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (3rd MAW). A girl in a pink dress and sequined sneakers toddles ...
Flash Fiction from Amanda Fields: “Buffalo”
When I was a child, and my father had just begun to be noticeably strange, my mother took me to the zoo. It was July, and hot. The lions were thin, their manes as brittle as straw. Monkeys tumbled ...
New Poetry by Denise Jarrott
manhunt will I always be poor always a slowing of small pittings where roots were milkweed meadowsweet rue or pink lilies on a backdrop dark, blooming rather against than next to themselves ...
New Fiction from Jennifer Orth-Veillon: Marche-en-Famenne
The following is an excerpt from Jennifer Orth-Veillon’s work-in-progress, The Storage Room. Here, she intersperses real letters from her grandfather (italicized), an American soldier who fou...
New Essay by Patrick Medema: Being Acquainted with Violence
I was in junior high the first time my friend was bullied. This was during the late 1990s, before we could maliciously attack someone from our phones or smart devices, when belittling someone took ...
Writing about Our Worst Experiences: Reshaping Memories
As many artists have noted, memory underpins imagination. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on the reshaping of what has gone before. —Charles Fernyhough. Pieces of Li...
New Essay from Jerad W. Alexander: An Exchange of Fire
I don’t know your name, but we tried to kill each other once. Do you remember it? It happened on November 5, 2005, on the second day of our big weeklong offensive in Husaybah, Iraq—a dense square o...
Mr. Tolkien’s War: A Review of Peter Jackson’s ‘They Shall Not Grow Old,’ by Rob Bokkon
Anyone who knows me at all well can tell you that I don’t really have a personality, per se: what I have instead is a gigantic amalgamation of obsessions. Fandoms. Things like the life and work of ...
New Poetry from Shana Youngdahl
After the Maine Tin Min Company Prospectus, 1880 The earth has veins we can open with our hammers. Follow the cassiterite crystals down where the iron dark is picked by the swings of men who name m...
New Essay from Claudia Hinz: The War at Home
Michael Florez felt called to the Marines. “No greater love than dying for your brother,” the 42-year-old Oregon resident says. In 2004, Florez was deployed to Ar Ramadi, Iraq, with the 2nd Battali...
HOMEBOY: New Fiction from Mark Galarrita
I went home to Jersey only once since the enlistment. I had to see my Ma. Back in the summer of 2011 I finished Basic and Advanced Individual Training for Cav Scouts and thought I’d officially beco...
New Poem by Eric Chandler: “The Path Through Security”
my family lived there before it was Maine before this was a even a country they still live there so we visit we fly in and out of the Jetport we place our shoes in a tray empty our pockets on the w...
New Fiction from Patrick Mondaca: “The Ministry of Information”
Too often your mind wanders back to those places where God has turned his face away. For example: the prison your platoon guarded in Baghdad in the early months of the war. Displaced Iraqi families...
New Poetry from Frank Blake
We came home And had nothing to do and nowhere to go and too much freedom and money and space and women and cars and booze. No more mission Like a marathon runner collapsed at the end of a race and...
The Iliad: A Poem of Force and Pity
Every fall I read the first stanza of the Iliad out loud to my students: “Sing, Goddess, the Anger of Peleus’ son Achilles / and its devastation…” (Iliad I:1-2)[1]. I ask them what the poem is abou...
The Hundred-Year Itch, or Remembering The Great War
Here are some facts about The Great War. It started in 1913. We know that from books. and the scarred nobles grandma met in the deli off 23rd and 8th, Ich hätte gerne eine Bratwurst they’d sa...
Great WWI-era Austrian Writers: Musil, Zweig, Roth
During this ongoing centenary of the First World War, I became more interested in the details of the Italian front in that war, a campaign not generally well-known to Anglophones like me. It did no...
New Fiction by Matthew J. Hefti: “Jean, not Jean”
Jean, not Jean by Matthew J. Hefti When I look in the mirror, I think I look stupid. Otherwise, I don’t even think of how I look. But when I do look in the mirror, it’s like I can’t look awa...
New Poetry by Amalie Flynn for the WWI Centennial
Zone Rouge (for the centennial) 1. When the land was. 2. Full of bodies dead. And twisted. 3. When the fighting was. 4. Sustained. 5. With bodies. Dead. Twisted on a riverbank. 6. Wrist bent. Hand ...
An Interview with Jennifer Orth-Veillon, Curator of the WWI Centennial Blog, by Andria Williams
Andria Wiliams: Jennifer, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with Wrath-Bearing Tree. We are all huge fans of the WWrite blog, which features posts from writers investigating a variety o...
Election Special: To Hell With Civility by Rob Bokkon
I’m so tired of re-writing this article. The drafts kept piling up and piling up and piling up, one after the other. I’d think I was done, and then—here comes the goddamn news again. Shock. Anger. ...
The Long Road of History Impacts Today
More than one hundred years ago, nine thousand acres of fruit trees and farm land in Maryland were converted to one of 16 cantonments established in preparation for America’s entry into WWI. Laws e...
No, Nazis were Not Leftists: Or, How to Debunk Right-Wing Propaganda
It is generally considered good practice not to “feed the trolls”— that is, not to engage in commentary with strangers on the internet who thrive on aggressive verbal hate and cruelty. But when the...
New Fiction from Andria Wiliams: “Polecat”
Camp TUTO, Greenland 1960 When Paul, a nuclear operator, had arrived in Greenland, the reactor at Camp Century was still not fully assembled, so he and a dozen other men were being held temporarily...
New Poetry from Randy Brown
victory conditions My father taught me to say I love you every time you stood in the door left for school went to work flew off to war it became a habit a good one like checking the tires or clicki...
New Nonfiction from Kiley Bense: Tell Me About My Boy
Here’s an empty grave, where a body that had been a boy became bones beneath a wooden cross. They buried him with one set of dog tags hanging against his bloodied chest. He bled in a field hospital...
New Fiction from Patrick Hicks: Into the Tunnel
Editor’s Note: “Into the Tunnel” is the first chapter of Patrick Hicks’s new novel, ECLIPSE. “The rocket will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which...