Such literary drawbacks are notably absent in Jim Beane’s debut novel, The Deadening, which features the return from war-torn Europe of American soldier Harrell Hickman. Like so many young veterans during this time, the euphoria of victory parades came and went in an instant.

As a reserve unit we had a different family dynamic than the regular army. Since there were only three platoons in our company, the commander wanted to even out the women per platoon.

Scott found the videotapes in his garage and brought them into the kitchen. We stacked the VHS in a wine box and the little Hi8 tapes in a gray shoebox for a pair of boots that belonged to his wife Tiffany.

One of the first things I published on Wrath-Bearing Tree was a negative review of the movie Fury, based entirely on its two minute preview.

I remember the smell of the plastic blue gym mats under my face as I grappled another Marine in the hanger bay of the USS Boxer. What felt like a youth indoor football field, except grey non-skid instead of turf, two huge accordion sliding doors which opened up to the elevators to take aircraft to […]

Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire. Chicago: Bridge Books, 2024. The 4-day 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit in Chicago, held from spring into the summer of 2023, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, was held in various venues in Chicago. A variety of exhibitions […]

All this is to say that pilgrimage is not for religious journeys alone, but for any act of traveling that takes us to a place of special cultural significance.

So that’s what I did. I sat down and attempted to write The Great American War Novel. I wouldn’t have sent the manuscript out on submission if I didn’t think I’d come as close as I was able to actually accomplishing that.

Whether we wanted it or not, America was – up until this very moment, perhaps – truly the indispensable nation.

Dillon crawled in circles on the carpet, the TV behind him glowing with reports of destruction and death. Though it had been only days since the boys left, it felt much longer.

I think at the time I was just kind of following my orders. And then, by the time I was thinking something’s wrong, I was so in it that I just kept following. It really took a couple of years before I started getting angry, but at that point it was kind of too late.

Her poetry is rarely sentimental or wildly emotional, but rather steady, wise, and quietly observational.

He was 39 years old at the time of his death, and left a wife, Betty and three children, Ora, Kathleen, and the youngest, nine-year old James.

But on a personal level, I don’t think there is an easy way out. I think the real answer is you need to go the other way—you need to change your mind. If you believe that tech is intentionally trying to rewire your brain, then that should frame everything you read on a device. Why was this fed to me? And what is it trying to make me feel?

Sometimes I’d imagine that compressing the areas of fat would break apart the tissue and allow it to dissolve into my body. In my downtime, I would knead the fat to a pulp.

It’s hard to define, awe. But certainly we know when we feel it. It’s a rare thing, buried under the onslaught of daily routine and the indignities of, say, a red traffic light when we’re late for work. Our ego—that most human of qualities—screams at us: “I am the universe. The universe is me.”

About four years ago I first encountered Kyle Seibel’s work while volunteering with this publication (Wrath-Bearing Tree). He submitted a poignant animated story, “Lovebirds,” which surprised and delighted me. It is unusual to experience surprise let alone delight at my age when encountering new fiction. This was during COVID. A vignette that didn’t beat you […]

Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures (PR&DC) is unafraid to be funny about serious subjects. Can you tell us some of the books that inspired you to write something as unsettling and wry as PR&DC? Or do you see it as a unique book in the history of military literature? Or is “military literature” even a […]

The temperature on this Tuesday morning in Grants Pass, Oregon, is edging up to ninety degrees as Helen Cruz and Justin Wallace enter the J Street Camp. The cloudless sky is a glazed, pale blue. Not surprising weather for late August, Helen knows.

I’ve changed all the names in this story except my own. They’re all dead, but … that afterlife thing just might be true. I’m an old man now, but I was ten or eleven or so in this story. Across the road, lived Ben, six months my senior, and Timmy, six months younger than me. […]

CROATOAN: A Review of Kevin Honold’s Our Lady of Good Voyage (Orison Books, 2024). Kevin Honold’s Our Lady of Good Voyage begins in an unnamed Ohio town populated with German ghosts. The Germans, the children and grandchildren of once prosperous immigrants, all elderly now, move through the streets incuriously, “lacking the imagination to move on.” […]

Chapter 12 of One Tick Stopped the Clock Published by Legacy Book Press Excerpted from ONE TICK STOPPED THE CLOCK Copyright © 2024 by Jennifer Crystal. Used with permission of Legacy Book Press, Camanche, Iowa. All rights reserved. Some edits made for context   “Slow down, Mom! I want to get there alive.” I don’t think […]

An Alternate View of Moral Injury Introductory note: I originally composed this essay between 2022-23. I’ve gone back and forth about publishing it; it’s true, I stand by everything I’ve written, but I’m certain that many people won’t like reading it. It is certain to damage or even destroy my reputation in certain circles. Let […]

Fights within the infantry were common enough that their variations came to be source material for a dark form of in-unit comedy. So it was with one of my tussles in the Pendleton dirt. My platoon, nearing a four-day weekend of liberty, hurled headlong into its assignments like men frenzied by a demon possession. Our […]

Doug Rawlings had his life planned out:  graduate school, business school, eventual law school, and a career in business. But then, like thousands of other young men, he received the dreaded SSS Form No. 252, Order to Report for Induction. Future plans on hold.  Rawlings completed Basic Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and AIT at Fort […]

In the remote and forgotten northwestern corner of Vietnam looms the vast, rugged and rain-drenched Hoang Lien Mountains. Here, Vietnam’s tallest summit, the 10,326-foot-high Fan Si Pan, towers above the rest. On the cold morning of March 30, 1994, from the mountainous village of Sa Pa at about 5,000 feet above sea level, I could […]

Time in a combat zone passes strangely. When you are surrounded by the incredible, the human mind has a tendency to dull your senses so that the days aren’t memorable, but there are a few days that stand out as brightly to me as a muzzle flash spitting in the dark.   One morning we […]

The most versatile piece of equipment an infantryman carries is a four-letter word. It can be used in almost every conceivable situation. It’s sharp, cuts smooth and clean. It can sever all manner of ties, emotional or professional or anything in between, in a single motion. Its shock-and-awe effect can rattle even the most linguistically […]

A Game of Soldiers – A Review of Playing Army by Nancy Stroer LT Minerva Mills is a hot mess. Literally. We meet her with ‘sweat pooling in her waistband’ as her mother rams through a terminally inappropriate ‘Pink Tea’ at Minerva’s first assumption of command ceremony at Fort Stewart, aka ‘Camp Swampy,’ Georgia, on […]

Missouri inmate Patty Prewitt has been in prison for almost 40 years. She is serving a life sentence for the murder of her husband, Bill, in 1984. The conviction, however, is problematic. The prosecution’s case relied upon slut-shaming Prewitt and questioning her fitness as a mother based on relationships that took place five and more years […]

I am careful with the coffee tray. It holds four coffees and one tea for my guys in the VA hospital lobby. Everyone who comes to the VA hospital spends time sitting in the lobby, waiting for a meeting with a doctor, or a blood draw, whatever they need. All of us are in the […]

Art After War: The Visual Diary of Danish Soldier Henrik Andersen As the memory of U.S. participation in the Afghanistan War fades in the minds of most Americans (the report on the exit fiasco notwithstanding), there was probably even less awareness that the military did not “go it alone” but had NATO allies, including Denmark (which […]

Dubai is one gigantic, grey strip mall. “Does anyone know why they call this place Dubai?” I look away from my bus window. The tour guide sits on the edge of her seat in the front row, leaning into the aisle, microphone in hand. “Come on,” her eyes wide, “Anyone want to guess? ‘Do’ and […]

29 April 1971 From: Naval Science Department To: Midshipmen Second Class, Navigation and Piloting 301 (NAV 301) Subject: Final Navigation Project-Due: 1600 hours, 13 May, Luce Hall, Room 104 Mastering navigation is critical for every Naval Officer. This project covers topics from the last eight months and represents 40% of your grade. Instructions, answer sheets, […]

  But vnto Kain and to his offering he had no regarde: wherefore Kain was exceeding wroth, and his countenance fell downe. —Genesis 4:5, Geneva Bible of 1560 From first light until long after sunset, Cain worked the land, raising mustard, wheat, and rye in crooked furrows scratched from the hard earth. When he stood […]

October 6, 1973. Los Angeles. The stack of newspapers sat in front of me on the brown shag carpet, and next to it was a plastic bag half full of red rubber bands. I reached into the bag, took a dozen or so bands and slipped them onto my wrist. I pulled a newspaper from […]

My year-long run as guest-columnist for The Wrath-Bearing Tree comes to an end this month. I’m not sure if WBT founders Adrian Bonenberger and Mike Carson planned for my stint to last only twelve months, but in my mind it was always the goal. Twelve months, twelve Strike Through the Mask! columns, each with a […]

There Is No Such Thing as an Unwounded Soldier Ron Whitehead works in a variety of photographic series:  Eye of the Storm are impressionistic visions of war to give a more dynamic view of combat than a strictly documentary approach.  One work shows a flaming parachutist plunging toward the ground; another shows a jet fighter […]

In collaboration with So Say We All‘s Veterans Writing Division, founder Justin Hudnall and The Wrath-Bearing Tree‘s Andria Williams had the privilege of serving 21 veterans, active-duty servicemembers, and veteran family members over 2023 by providing four masterclasses followed by an intensive creative writing workshop. We would like to thank our masterclass teachers, Abby Murray, […]

  30 questions; let’s see who knows their stuff. Answers below. 27-30 Correct: Expert 23-26: Sharpshooter 19-22: Marksman Less than 19: Bolo Ready, go! 1.  “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” This is the opening line to what 2012 novel by an Army veteran about two buddies deployed to Iraq? 2. “We […]

“Fire in the belly!” “Be all you can be!” “Get fired up!”  Slogans to incite, ignite, excite and encourage living on the edge—the thrill of defying death on the pages of peril. “Fire in the hole!” The acrid tang of sulfur and gun powder odor, the tympanic thrum in my ears.  “Drive on!” “Hoorah!” Be […]

Every work day morning at 8 o’clock sharp, me, Juan, Marcus, and Willard stand at attention with hands over our hearts while the national anthem plays on the loud speaker at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, San Diego, California. While the music plays, resident supervisor, Captain C. T. Wallace, in his Navy Reserve uniform, runs the […]

  Patrick Hicks: Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and taught English in South Korea for a year before he joined the United States Army. He served in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division and, when he was deployed to Iraq, he became an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker […]

Memoirs written by soldiers and Marines who fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq and the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan portray many events that caused their authors anguish. Below I describe three particularly wrenching episodes. More than narratives of harrowing combat action, they illustrate the emotional strife wrought by war. The first two […]

Corn, Coal & Yellow Ribbons. Poems by Kevin Basl and Nathan Lewis. Trumansburg, NY:  Out of Step Press, 2021. Midnight Cargo:  Stories and Poems.  Kevin Basl.  Trumansburg, NY: Illuminated Press, 2023. Corn, Coal & Yellow Ribbons is a chapbook of 11 poems, a collaboration between Kevin Basl and Nathan Lewis, who seek to answer the […]

In my blog Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature I rarely reviewed memoir and non-fiction. I also tried to promote stories about war other than those by infantrymen and stories about war that encompassed more than the battlefield. In Strike Through the Mask! I’ve expanded my reach to […]

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 lessen its brutality. Paul Fussell describes this delusion in the first pages of his text Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, […]

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 reflecting on two recent Afghanistan memoirs by veterans who served in the same area of Afghanistan as I […]

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 Western custodians. For starters, its population spoke obscure Indo-Iranian languages like Pashto and Dari, which had no share with our West Germanic-based English. It […]

    “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 Linus began to slap the living shit out of Louie V. The original offense was, along with Richard L., “jumping like […]

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 he had known the hero. They had taught together at West Point, and thought the vet was senior to the […]

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 sunlight seeping in yet through the open seam in the plywood and sandbags that cover the only window. He rolls out […]

“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 MTV reality series in which a bunch of people mostly from Staten Island, NY stayed at a […]

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 bent on doing me harm. How else to describe it? The house — its bannisters, its rooms — the […]

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 veterans, which was much celebrated on its arrival, has lost its luster. Author Mark Athitakis writes, “Two long wars, […]

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 this area all have this in common with Stephen King: the longer works can be powerful, but there is something particularly pointed […]

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, his dream was to be in the military, and he joined the Marines right out of high school—not knowing […]

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 fill much of the void. Between them MilSpeak and Middle West have recently published a remarkable number of interesting titles by new and established […]

  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 idea of blending into one’s surroundings to be unobserved, hiding in plain sight. There is the connotation of pretending, concealing, falsifying. One could add […]

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 nothing, “wait here.” Pre-double knee replacement, it took him some time to climb the stairs to the second floor […]

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 before while we played foosball in the hostel’s arcade. Starting your period at the base of […]

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 notable residents. Clara Barton lived there for a while, as did Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Joseph. Most famously, Thomas Paine, the British […]

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. Particular inputs yield fixed outputs. Even, say, in cases of absolute value, where more than […]

   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.  -Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul Doyle Whitehead flew Air Force One on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was killed […]

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-affiliated writers. (The event was co-sponsored by The Wrath-Bearing Tree.) I first met Hudnall many years ago at a writing conference and have long admired what he […]

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 compelled to finish Damiani’s story in one sitting (you’re excused if it takes two).  You will hate spewing coffee (or other […]

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 raspy cough and talking to himself sounded louder than usual. When World War II ended, my father’s brother Ray, after serving 27 years in […]

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? Take your concerns to the chain-of-command? Express your reservations privately to friends and family? Protest publicly by writing a congressman […]

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 to sign Zola’s “J’Accuse,” in a public letter defending Alfred Dreyfus. It was a courageous act for a man of the […]

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 they were a prisoner or a guard—could possibly know it all.

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 from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Kabul, Afghanistan has again receded from national interest. But another truism has held that a proper […]

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 served in the military, but their wars stayed cold. My mom’s reserve unit, Seattle’s Fiftieth General Hospital, […]

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 brothers. At seventeen he looked “collegiate” in madras plaid shorts and a pastel button-down shirt. He hated to be called […]

In the cold autumn dawn shadows blanket Othello Avenue, the parked cars and vans little more than gauzy, damp lumps, like furniture hidden beneath old sheets in a darkened room. The rising sun reveals a towering red sign with white lettering promoting, Wentworth Automotives, like some sort of beacon to the new day, and the […]

The scored green vinyl seat inside an Air Force Bluebird bus at the base of the “Bring Me Men” ramp at the U.S. Air Force Academy was slippery under my jeans. On this 1987 June afternoon, I was wearing my acid-washed Levis and the shortest haircut I’d ever had. The Naugahyde stink of the seats […]

Missouri inmate Patty Prewitt has been in prison for almost 40 years. She is serving a life sentence for the murder of her husband, Bill, in 1984. The conviction, however, is problematic. The prosecution’s case relied upon slut-shaming Prewitt and questioning her fitness as a mother based on relationships that took place five and more years […]

  Take me to the alley Take me to the afflicted ones Take me to the lonely ones that Somehow lost their way                                                                                                                                                                        Gregory Porter   The twelve-foot chain link capped with concertina wire said, Whoever you are, you aren’t welcome. The penitentiary sprawled on a barren hill in a forgotten tract […]

I have come to do a writing residency at the Museum of Loss and Renewal in Molise, southern Italy, in a remote mountain village to escape the distractions of Berlin. Just as every writer does when they go off for a residency, in this case, with the added burden of Covid having prevented me from […]

A little stoned, on the screen porch facing the invisible grunts of New Hampshire spring peepers. Something night, something woods, something long sleeve. Lou looks down into mostly darkness. They can barely see the plaid pattern. One of Alex’s, figures. You can swear off a person, but still wake in the middle of the night […]

Gravitational lensing – as half-remembered from an article I read years ago, as confirmed courtesy of a recent Wikipedia dive – takes advantage of the presence of massive objects to shape the path of light coming from objects on the far side relative to the viewer. A sufficiently large star, for instance, could be used […]

It is late October and the season is turning. The morning chill is not the surface cool of fog, the chill you feel in summer here at Point Reyes National Seashore, but the deeper cold of coming winter as the hemisphere tilts farther from the sun, a cold that settles in to ground, rocks, trees, […]

When I first saw the photo of David Spicer in a 2009 Army Times, I was excited to recognize my friend there on the page staring back at me.  The picture was closely cropped around his face, but I could tell he was in his dress uniform when the picture was taken.  I could see […]

  There’s a solid history of stupid when it comes to fireworks at our family cabin at the corner of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and—as Dad called it—West by-golly-stand-up-and-smile-when-you-say-it Virginia. When we spent weeks of our summers there in the eighties, Dad developed his own sort of bird call: “Careful!” The mountains put him on edge. In […]

Our pre-WWII house has two small bedrooms, a tiny closet in each. I feel virtuous when I fit my clothing into one, leaving my husband Bryan’s clothes to migrate between our daughter Kai’s closet and the hall’s. Once upon a time, an American family fit easily into this house. Perhaps they even kept a car […]

You are in the stairwell, standing with a few of your fellow medical students, waiting for that door in the basement to be unlocked. The smell of formalin and paraffin emerge from the hallway below, penetrating your nostrils. You take shallow breaths, which adds to your slight anxiety. Your heart rate rises just enough for […]

  ‘Tis a fearful thing to love What death can touch. To love, to hope, to dream, and oh, to lose . . . by Judah Halevi 12th century philosopher and poet June 1991. I’m half-way up a seventy-foot rock facing at Camp Hale, Colorado, my body pressed against the hard, cool granite. My fingers […]

Kate Schifani’s memoir, Cartography, maps faulty practices and question of fault over her year serving in Iraq as an advisor and logistician to the Iraqi military. In her dangerous deployed experience, she excels in her ill-defined, nearly impossible advisory role while serving during the context of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal that personally affected […]

“Something terrible happened today.” “At my school?” you asked. “No,” I replied. “But at a school, yes.” You asked how far away it was. You sat and blinked hard. You asked whether you would be safe. You reminded me that a similar thing had happened before, a week ago, or ten days ago, you couldn’t remember. […]

To fathom the Gun Culture and gun-related violence in the US, it is important to understand The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution, which protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as part of the first ten amendments contained in the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment was […]

With a slightly youthful blurring of reality, sandhill cranes resemble pterodactyls in flight. Each year when they return to the valleys and high plains of southern Montana, their warm bugles trill two miles in advance of their prehistoric forms, sounding the merciful turning of the season. Fuzzy aspen catkins map sporadic, swirling gusts while the […]

Andria Williams for The Wrath-Bearing Tree: I was honored to read Tom Keating’s memoir, ‘Yesterday’s Soldier,’ an excellently written and sensitive account of his time as a non-combatant servicemember during the Vietnam War. Tom had been a noviciate in the Roman Catholic priesthood, but when the priests at his seminary deemed him a not-ideal candidate […]

Why did Malcolm Gladwell write a World War II book? The bombing campaign over Europe and Japan is hardly his typical beat: Cliff-noting TED talks for the MBA crowd. Where’s the investment edge here? It’s an obvious question that Gladwell addresses in the opening Author’s Note. The Bomber Mafia is not so different than his […]

“We hear the Iraqi army is systematically blowing up buildings in downtown Kuwait City. If the architecture in Kuwait resembles the architecture in Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi army will have done one good deed, anyway. As soon as the Iraqis have all surrendered, let’s send them to New York and let them take a whack […]

In my childhood, television was a great unifier, for there existed a limited choice of three television networks, discounting PBS. But even if we were watching the same programming, television had begun to shape and change all of our lives—and our democracy—for the Vietnam War was broadcast into our homes every night as was the […]

I don’t want to keep going back there. I’m damn near forty years old; too broke and tubby to deploy anymore. It’s my kid’s birthday next week. I should be thinking about balloons, wrapping paper, last-minute toys to order off Amazon. I don’t want to keep going back there, to the dust up my nose […]

We all live in a kind of delirium: as if we have control of our lives, while we know damn well something is coming. We don’t know if it’s coming from the inside or the outside—a disease or a rogue wave. We don’t know when or where. But we know it’s coming. For me, I […]

“I was lying in a burned‐out basement with the full moon in my eyes. I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst through the sky. There was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting high. I was thinking about what a friend had said. I was hoping it was a […]

“I was like an inept spy pretending to be American based on movies I’d watched and books I’d read.” — Lauren Hough, ‘Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing’ “In 1984, we would arrive in Texas, and we might as well have been aliens.” — Sari Fordham, ‘Wait for God to Notice’ * In Lauren Hough and […]

I write this review of Oliver Stone’s new film during the most bizarre month in America since the January of the Capitol riots and the de-platforming of Donald Trump, a president who promised to release the final government files on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This November, a subculture of Americans known as QAnon […]

Skip Rohde was an officer in the Navy for twenty-two years, with four submarine deployments and service in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and Bosnian peace-keeping operations in 1996. After retirement (as a Commander) he attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting in 2003. He […]

As the United States marks the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the Global War on Terror as well as an ugly end to the conflict’s iteration in Afghanistan, it is a time for reflection. The war on the ground is over. The war of memory has begun in earnest. The canon of war memoirs […]

For thirteen years, I stored my boxes of army documents and medical records in various basements, closets, and attics, mostly not my own as I had fled the land for foreign adventures, eventually settling in Berlin. I couldn’t get far enough away from those boxes and what they reminded me of. But there, in those […]

“I was lying in a burned‐out basement with the full moon in my eyes. I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst through the sky. There was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting high. I was thinking about what a friend had said. I was hoping it was a […]

Suzanne Rancourt’s new book of poems, Old Stones, New Roads (2021) builds on the work of her two previous books (Billboard in the Clouds, 2014, and murmurs at the gate, 2019).  She dedicates the book to her grandmother, Alice Pearl, “who told me stories of where each stone came from that she used to build […]

(Editor’s Note: Some names have been changed for privacy.) The three white, rectangular buildings of Light of the Village ministry stand bright as a smile in the clammy humidity of a late Sunday afternoon in southern Alabama. A deep red cross rises above a stone walk where disturbed horseflies make a sharp buzzsaw of noise. On one […]

I can’t stop thinking about Dawit Tesfaye, an FBI agent in Diane Lefer’s excellent new novel, Out of Place. Shortly after 9/11 and the launch of the Global War on Terror, Tesfaye, along with his partner, Daniel Chen, are sent by the Bureau to investigate a laboratory in the Mojave called the Desert Haven Institute. […]

There were 10,000 of them. Boys fresh back from the war in France, middle-aged guys who fought in Cuba with TR, and old men who’d only ever handled a rifle to shoot squirrels and rabbits. They were country boys from the hollers, both black and white, they were Italian and Polish, Hungarian and Slovak. Some […]

The email takes me to a link that takes me to an article displaying two mugshots. The mugshots take me back to winter. It was a southern snow day, at least five inches of accumulation and more flakes still falling. It was 2014. I believe weather records for the region were broken. I believe it […]

I first heard about Brett Allen’s debut novel, ’Kilroy Was Here’, by tweet from Matt Gallagher (@MattGallagher0), author of Empire City, Youngblood, and Kaboom. (Matt always has good reading recommendations, and this one was outstanding.) Reading this book felt like I was listening to a good war story over beers with friend. I sent Allen […]

Warrior Songs is a series of albums created under the direction of Iraq War veteran Jason Moon, profiled here in Wrath-Bearing Tree (October 2020). With the release of Warrior Songs’ third CD, this time focused around the Vietnam War, journalist Larry Abbott wanted to revisit this collective effort among veteran-musicians to create musical anthologies around […]

1. A Child A neglected box in the back of my closet contains a contain a collection of items from my father’s apartment, I find. In the midst of a stack of curling black-and-white photo prints there is one that I don’t remember having seen before. About two inches by three, it’s a photo from […]

Hassan Blasim’s 2014 short-story collection The Corpse Exhibition captured American readers with its harrowing portrait of an Iraq wrecked by authoritarian rule, oppressive Islamic custom, American invasion, and sectarian in-fighting. The stories in The Corpse Exhibition were Poe-like in their ability to combine story-telling prowess—often humorous–with unexpected and sensationally graphic violence. Especially for readers familiar […]

LYON, France—When the Taliban shoved him out of the sedan with the butts of their Kalashnikovs, Medhi could barely walk. For eight hours, they had blindfolded him, kept his hands tied behind his back, and beat his legs with plastic pipes. “To kill you is our right for two reasons,” he says the Taliban members […]

I cannot separate my early memories of war from those of cycling. I’d just begun to cycle competitively — as a lieutenant and duathlete stationed in San Antonio — when I deployed to Afghanistan in the summer of 2002. And in the short several months I was stateside before deploying to Iraq 2003-2004, I spent […]

The following is an excerpt from David Chrisinger’s new book, Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing About Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, July 2021). In this section, Chrisinger has embarked on a canoe trip with author, veteran, and EOD specialist Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk, All the Ways We […]

When I was losing myself, the only thing that saved me was immigrating to America. Only then, with great effort and sacrifice, I was able to come out to  myself and do what we all have to do for ourselves – to be who we are. Condemnation, fear, physical injury, loss, death – these are […]

In seventh grade my Catholic elementary school received a new principal, Sister Bernadette, who strode onto the blacktop that first day like Darth Vader walking down the ramp of an Imperial shuttle. Her determined expression and alert eyes matched her gait, punctuated with her stylish yet sensible thick-heeled, closed-toe pumps. She wore what I would […]

Kevin Honold’s new essay collection, The Rock Cycle, begins in the Arabian Desert. It is 1991. U.S. forces have just invaded Kuwait to push Saddam Hussein’s armies back into Iraq. Honold’s unit is lost. They stumble upon a Bedouin camp. His Lieutenant asks the Bedouins if they have seen other soldiers, tugging at his uniform, […]

June 27, 2008 I count between my mother’s breaths: one-thousand one, one-thousand two. Thirty minutes ago, her breaths were one second apart, and an hour ago, they were less than half a second apart. In the next few minutes, I know the interval between her breaths will become even longer, and soon, they will cease […]

In 2011, two years before I show up to Officer Candidate School, the Marine Corps changes its uniform order to allow black memorial bracelets in uniform.  ‘Acknowledging the close personal nature of our 10 years at war and the strong bonds of fidelity that Marines have for one another, especially for those fellow Marines who we […]

My earliest exposure to the literature of 19th century Alaska came in the form of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. An adventure to match the dreams of idealistic youth, Call of the Wild carried me away, and may have been my first book-length encounter with anthropomorphism. Its characterization of good and evil—of right and […]

Early on in Nico Walker’s Cherry, the narrator, working a dead-end shoe store job to pay for drugs while his parents pay for his college, says that he has a well cultivated sense of shame. This is true. He does. Many people do not. Many people are shameless. They do not care how they degrade […]

Timothy Reyes (Danny Ramirez), a young Marine Lance Corporal veteran, spends his days riding subway trains throughout New York City.  As he travels he pops more and more pills, surrounded by uncaring strangers oblivious to his plight. Eventually he is found in a deserted subway car, dead from an overdose. Dave Van Ronk’s song “Luang […]

If I were to write a morality tale about America’s counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan—something in line with Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, I’d make heavy use of allegory. That’s what people did in the 16th and 17th century, they named monsters for the seven deadly sins, and great heroes […]

Ng Shui Meng speaks of her husband Sombath Somphone in the present tense, with a firm matter-of-fact tone about his disappearance, a way, I presume, for her to maintain control in a situation where she has none and knows nothing but heartbreak. Yet I hear the deep sentiment behind the words. To her, Sombath is […]

My first encounter with Joana Scholtz was as I ran after her (and her husband, Rik Jackson) as they were exiting campaign headquarters and about to enter their car. I was on assignment photographing football fans on the first day of the NFL season and I was on the lookout for people decked out in […]

Forty years ago, I was living in Madrid working on a grant from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation to learn how Spanish theater had changed since Francisco Franco’s death. While there I was detained twice–once by the national Civil Guard and a second time by the Madrid police. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was […]

My husband has downloaded a sleep cycle app for his phone. Every evening he tucks the phone into bed with him, under the sheets so it can measure how many times he moves during the night, and when he enters deep sleep. In the morning, the app displays a dark graph full of his various […]

Part 1: The Healing Shed In 2016, my husband burned our guesthouse to the ground. He left a t-shirt over a lightbulb while painting the eaves, and the fire inspector said the motion detector probably kept turning the light on in the wind, eventually causing a spark. Kent works meticulously and always cleans up; I […]

John Gurdenson’s legs weren’t what they used to be, and though the veteran charged hard on the forecheck, he was slow, too heavy and slow, and all of us in the arena groaned as the puck slipped down the ice away from him again. The opposing defenseman took control, easily stepped away, beat Gurdenson along […]

There are four ways of telling what happened. 1. Just tell the truth. Some stories are told just once; others are told over and over again, like myths and legends. We remember such stories not because they are memorable, but because they have been told. Like the well-crafted, witty, searing, suspenseful story of Odysseus and […]

Time is much longer when you’re sober, moments like molecules dragging into pixelated detail with nothing to dull the sharp edges. I sit quietly on the beach this morning melting into day. The river of time passes through me here. I’m new to this island and I’ve just learned of its ley lines. Some things […]

INTRO: Vince Gabriel has been making music since his high school days in New Jersey.  Born in South Amboy on September 16, 1947, he learned the guitar after his father brought one home. Influenced by the rock music of the early and mid-1960’s, The Rolling Stones in particular, Gabriel played in rock bands in and […]

One of the first books I read was given to me by my father, who got it from his father—a children’s version of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Opening the tome in the garret that was our home, I’d be transported to the vastness of Homer’s Aegean. A giant tome that has fit awkwardly on […]

Here are questions. How is it possible to engage in a process of healing for the evils of history?  Who has the right to ask forgiveness for historical crimes? Who will be chosen to represent the perpetrators? Who is qualified to bring a spirit of contrition that is commensurate with the gravity of the occasion? […]

Jason Moon served in Iraq with a combat engineering battalion. He returned to the States in 2004 and was eventually diagnosed by VA psychologists with depression, insomnia, and adjustment disorder. Despite medication his condition worsened, leading to a suicide attempt in 2008, which resulted in a diagnosis of PTSD.  This diagnosis started his healing process, […]

Nostalgia is another word for history, but only our personal, petty, smalltime histories; history is all about the size of the frame, and nostalgia is a 3×5 photograph cropped around the perfect images of memory, and never more than in love and war. In these recent days, as veterans like me confront our old military […]

The motto of the U.S. Marine Corps, or USMC, is “Semper Fidelis.” Commonly translated to “always faithful,” the motto—adopted in 1883 upon the urging of Colonel Charles McCawley, 8th commandant of the Marine Corps—replaced earlier mottos, including “with courage” and “by sea, by land.” The definition of the motto and what it “means” to be […]

The following excerpt is from Teresa Fazio’s Fidelis: A Memoir, reprinted with permission from Potomac Books.  A week before leaving Iraq, I shuffled through my post-deployment health assessment, a quiz to divine if we were crazy or sick or prone to shooting our loved ones. I gave the pasty Navy doc the answers he wanted: […]

As Patrick Hicks’s novel In the Shadow of Dora opens, it is July 1969 in bright-and-sunny Cape Canaveral, Florida. In just a few days the United States will send astronauts to the moon for the first time, hopefully with success, and, because of this, Dr. Wernher Von Braun is all over American television. Dr. Von […]

INTRODUCTION Emily Yates joined the Army at 19, spent six years in, from 2002 until her “release,” as she puts it, in 2008, finishing as an E-4, and served two deployments to Iraq in 2005-06 and 2007-08.  She calls herself a former “public affairs minion, writing heartwarming news stories about the Iraq War to help build […]

Elliot Ackerman is the author of four novels–most recently Red Dress in Black and White, set in Istanbul primarily during the 2013 Gezi Park protests–and a memoir. Here’s a synopsis of Red Dress: “Catherine has been married for many years to Murat, an influential Turkish real estate developer, and they have a young son together, […]

First Sergeant Russell Tuason faces a dilemma: does he deploy once again to Iraq to lead the troops he has been training, or does he take a meritorious retirement from the Army and begin a family with his wife Krissy? His best friend, Sgt. Emmanuel Sanchez (Ramon Rodriquez), tells him that he has already proven […]

Americans do not genuinely support the troops. This is the impression Ben Fountain’s 2012 war novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk left me with. Though American society supports their military in theory, they don’t care beyond their own comfort zones. And by comfort zones I mean luxurious “La-Z-Boy’s” close to the remote for changing the channel as […]

In view of the failures of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, which has seen over 2 million cases and more than 115,000 deaths as of this writing, the very idea of American exceptionalism has unraveled. The expected arrival of the pandemic in the USA was met with overwhelming failures. A country with unmatched military […]

By M.C. Armstrong and Noor Ghazi Protestors in Iraq have a great deal in common with the new wave of protestors in the United States. David McAtee, the owner of a barbecue restaurant and an unarmed demonstrator in Louisville, Kentucky, was shot dead by police shortly after midnight on May 31st while marching in response […]

A photo essay on the ongoing struggle of Korean “comfort women” In 2010, I visited The House of Sharing, a residence and nursing home outside of Seoul, South Korea, for former Korean “comfort women.” It was founded in 1992 by funds raised by Bhuddist organizations and civic groups. “Comfort women” is a euphemism for females […]

It was a relatively clear and cool night in the spring of 2008 on our fortified U.S. compound, Camp David, which was co-located on the property of the Najaf Technical University at the southern end of Najaf, Iraq. I was smoking hookah and watching Arabic TV with our local Iraqi guards, something I did nightly, […]

In the first weeks of lockdown, I paced my two-room Harlem apartment, feeling trapped while an unpredictable threat loomed. After a few days, it clicked— the collective need for vigilance and protective gear had stoked memories of my deployment to Iraq as a Marine Corps officer. There, rocket and mortar attacks had punctuated long periods […]

“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” 20th-century French writer Albert Camus chose these lines penned by Daniel Defoe as the epigraph for his novel, The Plague. It may come as a surprise that they hail […]

All beings in this world, all bodies must break up: Even the Teacher, peerless in the human world. The mighty Lord and perfect Buddha has passed away. — The joy of renunciation in The Radical Buddhist.  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, […]

A portion of this essay was originally published in Cobalt Review. It came by helicopter twice a week, if weather and security were sufficient for air travel. In the shack next to the Helicopter Landing Zone, it was sorted by unit; everything bound for “Provincial Reconstruction Team Paktia” loaded onto the back of a rickety […]

As Avengers was wrapping up last year, I mentioned how excited I was to see the finale to a friend, who responded with a barely suppressed sneer. Granted, it’s the same friend whose Blu-Ray copy of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood I’ve had for nearly six years, never watched, and now that I think about it, might […]

1972 I was back from a year of flying helicopters in Vietnam. The Army gave me a make-work job at Ft. Riley, Kansas, a base over-crowded with dejected Vietnam returnees. I hated it there, where they said, “Custer told us not to change a thing until he gets back.” I was angry and disillusioned and […]

“You have to construct a journey for the camera that’s every bit as interesting as the journey of the actor. What I wanted was one ribbon, like a snake, moving forward, in which the information that you needed happened to fall in front of where the camera was pointing.” -Sam Mendes It is a glorious […]

“Even if one does not know the history, one feels the presence of the past.” ~Peter Balakian “You have to beat the egg,” my grandmother said while cracking shells over a mixing bowl. “Beat the egg?” my sister asked, her little brows nearly colliding. “But I don’t want to hurt it!” My grandmother laughed. Covered […]

Amy Waldman’s novel, A Door in the Earth, follows Parveen, a young Afghan-American woman who returns to her war-torn homeland after discovering a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane. Parveen is not the only American influenced by the book; Mother Afghanistan has become a bible for American counterinsurgency operations  in the country. If part of that […]

Two years ago, Tracy Crow, an author, former Marine, invited me to be a part of the MilSpeak Foundation ON POINT Women Warriors Writing Workshops she took around the country, offering a free weekend of writing instruction to women veterans and veteran family members. The workshops, in Tampa and Charlotte, were creatively inspiring and a […]

The first time I heard the phrase “Hate Train,” I was stationed in Japan with the Navy, attempting to enjoy a bowl of oatmeal. Our previous officer-in-charge (OIC) had finished turning over with his replacement and the new guy was proving to be a micromanaging, all-knowing, pain-in-the-ass. Mind you, I didn’t dislike him as a […]

Still Come Home, the first novel from Flashes of War author Katey Schultz, opens in the tiny town of Imar, Afghanistan, where a young woman stands by the window, wanting an apricot. The weather is hot and the woman is hungry and thirsty, and she thinks to herself that she would like very much to […]

Andria Williams: Hey there, Adrian. Adrian Bonenberger: Hi, Andria. Williams: So, I heard you recently saw “Joker” in the theater, as did I. It’s gotten a lot of buzz. I’ve seen various reviews call it everything from “disappointing” to “an ace turn from Joaquin Phoenix” to “not interesting enough to argue about,” but I get […]

October 08, 2019 The war in Afghanistan is now old enough to go to war in Afghanistan. Yesterday the war in Afghanistan, first to fall under the catchall designation of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), turned 18 years old, meaning that individuals who were not yet born when it started are now old enough […]

1. I’m reading Aaron Graham’s war poetry. And I think violence is a volcano. How pressure builds. Between layers of rock. Trapped in a chamber. Or when magma pushes. Fissures like rivers. Up through the upper mantle. Finding surface. How it erupts. Spews hot lava and ash. How bodies can blow. Apart and across a […]

“It is a wise child who knows its own father.” –Homer, The Odyssey Several women I know were stunned in later life by the discovery that the man they had long considered to be their father was not the man whose sperm actually fertilized their mother’s egg. Their pasts—all that they had taken for granted […]

On a spring day in 1984 my grandfather, Leonard Clark, whom we all called Papaw, gathered his children, grandchildren, and friends around a little building on a patch of land near the French Broad River outside of Asheville, North Carolina – a place formerly known as the Snake Farm – to dedicate a tiny church […]

In the summer of 1968, while starting several of the essays that would comprise her collection The White Album, Joan Didion began to suffer from a series of unexplained physical and emotional ailments. After an attack of “vertigo and nausea,” she underwent a battery of tests at the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital […]

D.H. Lawrence once claimed that the “essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” This sounds nice, something to be proud of in a masochistic sort of way; unfortunately (or fortunately), it’s not true. Americans might be hard, isolate, stoic killers at times, but what people aren’t? Here is the D.H. Lawrence quote […]

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 Books article “The Myth of the Trauma Hero, from Wilfred Owen to ‘Redeployment’ and ‘American Sniper.’” The LARB piece asserted that American war literature over-privileges the emotional suffering of white male American combatants at the expense of their war […]

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 editors, Matthew Hefti and Mike Carson, into his Dallas home for lunch and an interview this past month. The interview took place at a dining […]

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 so he crashed into it on his way to the shower the next morning. Butthead and […]

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 caring; most active-duty military, veterans, and their families, however, have not. Regardless of status—civilian or veteran—as citizens we are all equally responsible when our […]

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 assault in the armed forces—most recently, when I read Senator Martha McSally’s recent statement that she’d been raped by a senior officer, […]

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 killed along with Davis, Rogers, Johnson, and 1SG Curry in the D11 vehicle.” Not every man has a positive relationship with his brother. Tim Davis did; he […]

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 and my cousin, Kim. Somehow, we got into the topic of women in combat. I made some […]

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 starred review, Kirkus called it “an absolutely compelling war memoir marked by the author’s incredible strength of character and vulnerability.” How […]

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 pushing our kids across the ice of Westchester Lagoon, a large pond here in Anchorage that the […]

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 what she saw. We were almost the same height, and though I had armor and a […]

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 you heard, but Jack Smith died.” And you already know what that really means. Gun, drug overdose, poison, […]

  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 after her mother into the children’s room. They are greeted by the singsong voice of the librarian, who welcomes […]

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 a personal touch, away from keyboard. I wasn’t there but the bully had hit my friend, nothing serious, no broken bones, […]

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 Light At our recent MFA residency, I gave a workshop on writing about your worst experience, using a number of examples to illustrate how writers confront personal […]

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 of markets, mosques, and homes tucked into the corner where the Euphrates River meets the Syrian border. Nearly […]

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 Prince Rogers Nelson. Hungarian cuisine. The history of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.  The films of Peter Jackson. […]

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 Battalion, 5th Marines. He was the point man, the first guy in to clear buildings of Al Qaeda, Taliban and foreign jihadists. These […]

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 about and eventually someone states the obvious: Achilles’ anger. Then I ask how the poem ends. Someone says with […]

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 not take me long to realize that I was also quite ignorant, historically speaking, of their opponent—the Austrian-Hungarian empire. A friend […]

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 of aspects of the events and legacy of the First World War. Since 2016, you’ve had close to 100 contributions on topics […]

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. Horror. And again. And again. And again, but way worse this time. I’m beginning to feel like a character […]

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 establishing Camp Meade were signed in April of 1917. By September of that same year, the first recruits arrived, moving into wood […]

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 president himself is little more than a troll and the entire right-wing media apparatus increasingly relies on weaponized trolling (as well […]

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 bed not far from here, shrapnel buried in his skin. Is that what killed him—hot metal melting […]

It was in the news. On a bright summer day in Helmand Province, Lance Corporal Wickie did his duty and killed an insurgent. A suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the berm of Outpost Shir Ghazay. Wickie returned fire, then applied a tourniquet to someone’s wounded leg. He earned a Combat Action […]

Andria Williams: Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I’ve just finished reading “Into the Tunnel,” the first chapter of your new novel, Eclipse. I was struck as always by what an immersive, detailed world you create, the tension you achieve, and the beauty and specificity of your language. […]

Our two featured poems for the month are selections from Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales’s anthology, Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando. Here, WBT editor Andria Williams interviews the two editors about this unique, gorgeous, and necessary passion project. As Morales describes, The pieces in Pulse/Pulso came from the initial days and months after the […]

I recently attended the 15th International Conference on the Short Story in Lisbon, where I met many interesting writers, read from my own work, and participated in a panel that discussed the question in the title. I would like to thank my fellow panelists, all wonderful people and writers: Garry Craig Powell, Sandra Jensen, Rebekah […]

“The Interpreters,” a new documentary film by directors Sofian Khan and Andres Caballero, is a raw, emotionally vigorous, and, only too often, devastating look into the lives of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and their efforts to flee home for the United States. When it comes to narratives of the Forever Wars, interpreters consistently rate as […]

CALL ME AMERICAN / Abdi Nor Iftin Excerpted from Chapter Five: Arabic to English By December of 1992, the world could no longer sit back and watch the starvation in Somalia. Humanitarian aid had been coming in for months but the warlords grabbed all the food and medicine for themselves and gave none to the […]

    Matt Young is a writer, teacher, and veteran. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships from Words After War and The Carey Institute for Global Good. You can find his work in Catapult, Granta, Tin House, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He teaches composition, literature, […]

Part I: The House, circa 1977 The house in Uganda was red brick with a metal roof, a rusted water tank, and a screened-in verandah that had once been painted green. My mother spent most of her day on that verandah. She read Psalms to us there in the mornings, combed our hair afterwards, and […]

“Crossing the River with No Name,” the eighth story in Will Mackin’s debut collection, Bring Out the Dog, describes the movement of a SEAL team “to intercept” Taliban coming out the Pakistan Mountains. Using night-vision equipment, the SEALs plan to light up the night-blind Taliban with sparklers that the Taliban cannot see, and then fire […]

“At the head of the column trots the fat sergeant-major. It is queer that almost all of the regular sergeant-majors are fat. Himmelstoss follows him, thirsting for vengeance. His boots gleam in the sun…Then he steams off with Himmelstoss in his wake.” Himmelstoss, as anyone who is familiar with All Quiet on the Western Front knows, is […]

It’s never easy to voice suspicions that your boss is out to get you. No matter how you describe it, the accusation sounds crazy. By the time you’re ready to put your instincts into words, you’ve already spent hours, days, weeks making the argument to yourself and telling yourself it’s all in your head. It’s […]

I met a woman on my way to Iraq.  Just before I stepped onto the midnight plane to Baghdad, she asked me what should have been a simple question: “Who do you work for?” Her name was Moni Basu. She was a journalist. She had thick dark hair, an intense demeanor, and she wore a […]

Guest Interviewer Peter Molin of Time Now interviews U.S. Navy veteran Will Mackin. Mackin’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Tin House, and The New York Times Magazine. His story “Kattekoppen” was selected by Jennifer Egan for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2014, and his essay about being an extra on Breaking Bad, published in GQ, was nominated for an American […]

We are of Trinidad—my grandmother, my mother, and I. Our island is located in the Lesser Antilles of paradise, a dot on the map that is often forgotten. It like ah drop ah oil, some say, as doh somebody forget to wipe it ahwey. The bodies of water that seep into the island are as much a […]

In her debut memoir, Krystal A. Sital paints a vivid picture of life in Trinidad, which to any tourist’s eyes must seem like something of a paradise. Blue-green waters, intersected by rapid streams and jungle vegetation: the inhabitants of Trinidad are surrounded by the call of the Caribbean filled with carnivals, rum, calypso, and soca […]

Helen Benedict is the author of seven novels, five books of nonfiction, and a play. Her most recent novel, WOLF SEASON, is this month’s fiction selection on The Wrath-Bearing Tree. WOLF SEASON “follows the war home,” as a starred review in Library Journal puts it, examining war’s reverberations on the lives of three women and […]

On May 17, 1875, under blue skies and wearing the flapping green-and-orange silks of his legendary employer J.P. McGrath, a diminutive, tough, whip-thin African-American jockey named Oliver Lewis, weighing little more than a hundred pounds, careened to the first Kentucky Derby victory on a chestnut Thoroughbred with a white blaze and two white socks named […]

Where were you when Michael Herr died in 2016? What were you doing? Did you listen to the opening voiceover of Apocalypse Now? Martin Sheen’s main character said “all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I wanted a mission and for my sins they gave me one.” Did you watch Stanley […]

The Wrath-Bearing Tree (Andria Williams): Taylor Brown is the author of a collection of short stories, In the Season of Blood and Gold, and three novels: Fallen Land, hailed by Booklist as “a masterpiece;” The River of Kings, and Gods of Howl Mountain, out next month (March 2018), of which a starred Booklist review said: […]

  Part II of II I should’ve been more concerned when someone fingered the words “Die Dike” into the dust on my rental car. I should’ve told someone. I was a twenty-three year old Combat Rescue Controller in the Air Force. Sounds like a cool job. Makes you picture me jumping out of a helicopter, […]

There’s an odd narrative thread in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 Lady Bird. The titular hero lives out her senior year of high school against the backdrop of the Iraq War. Characters watch the war’s escalation on televisions while debating boyfriends, mothers, friends, school plays, and sex. But the war has no direct bearing on the narrative—it […]

Jay Baron Nicorvo’s novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin’s Press), was picked for IndieBound’s Indie Next List, Library Journal‘s Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, and named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers. He’s published a poetry collection, Deadbeat (Four Way), and his nonfiction can be found in The Baffler, The Iowa Review, and The […]

Sitting in front of my computer one evening, scrolling idly through Facebook items, a long post catches my eye. As a novelist, I’m sympathetic to fellow writers who can’t fit their thoughts into tidy soundbites, who need space to express their concerns. So I click “read more,” hoping someone will give me valuable food for […]

    Part I of II My first time at the closest gay bar to Shaw Air Force Base, the bouncer asked me if I had a membership. I wasn’t expecting that question. But South Carolina blue laws only allowed private clubs to serve liquor on Sundays. So every bar in South Carolina called itself […]

There is no status quo in politics. Things really do fall apart, to quote the overly quoted Yeats. For those of us born after WWII, the seven decades of Pax Europa and subsequent founding of the European Union seemed like a permanent state and a symbol of progress and hope for human solidarity. History, it […]

It has been a long six and a half years since the Arab Spring, the popular movement of early 2011 that toppled dictators and challenged regimes across the Middle East. While Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt have since then followed different political paths trending either upwards, flat, or downwards respectively, Syria has virtually fallen off a […]

Diving into an 850-page biography of one of the most monstrous and powerful men who ever lived is not something one does lightly. So it was with some hesitation that I opened the pages of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s acclaimed Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003). Montefiore begins the biography on a night in […]

While it’s fallen off the news somewhat, one of Donald Trump’s most conspicuous campaign-trail promises was to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Not only did Trump say that a wall was necessary, but he said that he would get Mexico to build it, conveniently ducking the question of cost to U.S. citizens. […]

At some point during my education, I developed a powerful sense of skepticism toward the Epic. Every literary or cinematic attempt to tell the story of a nation on behalf of the nation ended up oversimplifying distinctions, privileged the powerful over the weak, and trivialized or marginalized individual stories outside the mainstream. I don’t remember […]

The lucrative Arms Sales market exists in the exact place where rational self-interest intersects with humanist idealism. Much as individuals have a right to exist, countries have a right to exist, and few would contest the prudence of building and maintaining modern weapons by which to protect that right. When a country builds weapons for its own military, and the […]

I think it was Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese author and filmmaker, who talked of the writer being the voice of the voiceless. That is still true in all societies. Art should ignite our dreams for a more human world.   –Teju Cole In a previous essay on the Dictator Novel, I touched on the question […]

Every American soldier takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies. Since I left the service, I wondered who those enemies truly were. Once, I thought they were those disciples of God in the mountains of Afghanistan. When we went to war, the newsreaders told us that the Taliban buried women […]

    “Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers     of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit.”  Chinua Achebe Of the thousand and one reactions of horror and shock following the illegitimate victory and first months of the Trump administration, one of the most interesting variations I have heard is: […]

Most schoolchildren in the English-speaking West read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in high school or college. Since its publication in 1729, A Modest Proposal has become a staple of English literature, the most recognizable satirical example of hyperbole. A Modest Proposal is often read by students of history, politics, and economics for similar reasons. […]

In the social history of our country, the current cultural moment may seem particularly conducive to division, denial and fear. But in his 1962 essay “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” James Baldwin exposes what he sees as a specifically American character trait: panic at the idea that our dreams have failed, and the […]

South African-born writer John Coetzee is one of the most decorated and celebrated living writers. He has won the Nobel Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, and was the first two-time winner of the Booker Prize. He has written 13 novels, 3 fictionalized autobiographies, and numerous essays and translations. Every one of his works from his first […]

This February marks the 100 year anniversary of an event that transformed Europe, brought the US into WWI, and nearly led to the destruction of capitalism. While it seems farfetched from the perspective of our western-dominated consumer-capitalist world order, a union between workers and soldiers—February Revolution, in Petrograd (now St. Petersberg)—toppled Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II […]

How can a society so disconnected from its wars welcome back its fighting women and men? What do we lose when we privilege individuality over collectivity? WBT Writer Drew Pham joined in a panel discussion with Sebastian Junger on his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, alongside Columbia University Professors Beth Fisher-Yoshida, Peter Coleman. Venera Kusari of the Negotiation […]

We have leaders, in the USA, it's always been that way. I don’t believe in some magical, fairyland communal or egalitarian America that was free from hierarchy. The settlers who occupied the land through Siberia and Asia did so in tribal societies some of which were patriarchies, and some of which were matriarchies. The invading […]

The day after the election felt all too familiar. It felt like 9/11. Then, as now, that day only promised a long road ahead. The years that followed, I dreaded a war I felt duty bound to fight. I was only twelve on 9/11, but I came from a family a Vietnamese refugees, for whom […]

Shortly after Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize was awarded to fellow American Paul Beatty for his novel The Sellout. It seems Americans are having a moment in the world of literary prestige, maybe to counterbalance the current political nadir. Dylan was the first American to win the Nobel in […]

Since 1989-1991 when every country in the USSR or the Warsaw Pact (save Russia) jumped ship at the earliest opportunity, reasonable people have asked the question: why does the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) still exist? This essay represents an attempt to understand basic criticisms that exist across the Western and non-Western political spectrum—to take them at face value, […]

Philosophy used to be the king of science. Hard to imagine now, but it’s true. Over the last few centuries, however, the divide between science and philosophy has grown larger and more irreconcilable, even while science overwhelmingly surpassed philosophy in importance. Philosophy has become a specialized field for unanswerable metaphysical and ethical questions, while science, […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT David's review of Mark Thompson's The White War and the particular stupidity of the Italian front in World War One. With the murders of unarmed black men […]

During this ongoing centenary of the First World War, interest in “The War to End All Wars” has returned, especially in the form of articles and essays. In the English-speaking world, this is almost always focused on the Western Front and the battles featuring Britain or the USA (I contributed to this phenomenon with my […]

On 9/11–Punk, Protest, and Witness: WBT Editors Choose Their Jams There was a chance, in 1991, for the US to take a responsible role in leading the world into the 21st century. Rather than do this, we worked instead to profit from former enemies’ weakness. In doing so, in prioritizing our own interests over those […]

Recent news articles about coal pollution in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, and protests against new pipelines in North Dakota by the Standing Rock Sioux caught my eye. I’m an ardent environmentalist, but I’ve never been to and know little about the Mountain West area of the United States. The name of this particular […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Adrian writes about how deep war memories go in today's Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine Another one by Adrian discussing the legacy of the British retreat at Dunkirk […]

World War Two never ended. It sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, right? Either the bad guys won, or the good guys didn’t win, and either way, history as we know it isn’t right. You can hear the Hollywood producer saying “great premise, kid, get a star to sign on and […]

Whatever one might think about the United Kingdom’s recent behavior toward Europe—its antagonism toward the European Union, willingness to undermine international markets, and everlasting search for the best possible deal—you can’t say it didn’t help beat the Nazis. Regardless of their unwillingness to participate in the collective European post-war experiment, you can’t say the UK […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT In case you missed it the first time, check out Drew Pham's fascinating essay Every Soldier a Thread. Mike Carson wrote about why the nation's capital does […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT David James discussed Plato's Republic and how it relates to Donald Trump–namely, what kind of leader and democracy do we really want? Adrian Bonenberger writes live from […]

Plato’s most famous work and the foundational text of political philosophy is the Republic. Written in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and other real-life Athenians, the book opens with a discussion about the nature of justice and then proceeds into Plato’s ideas about what an ideal state and its leader would look like. […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Drew Pham's essay Each Soldier a Thread meditates on the Orlando massacre and how violence effects soldiers long after coming home. David James reviewed two more recent science […]

One of the most illustrious living scientists, E.O. Wilson, is still active and writing great books well into his ninth decade. In this article I will review two of his most recent works, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) and The Meaning of Human Existence (2014). E.O. Wilson (1929-)Wilson, a biologist considered to be the [...]

The violence that reached our shores left me at a loss—every attempt to conceptualize these tragedies failed to capture the emotions moving me. I tried to make sense of San Bernardino and Orlando by writing, but after a dozen drafts I realized that failure is at the heart of my shock and sorrow. We bore […]

“If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.”     Attributed (probably falsely) to Jonas Salk The good news is that most of the world has finally accepted […]

Since the last time we conducted a wrapup, the following has occurred: NATO finished the largest joint exercises in over a decade, England voted to leave the EU, personal hero to all WBTers (and creative non-fiction pioneer) Michael Herr passed away, and Bernie Sanders pledged to vote for Hillary Clinton, which some had feared would not be […]

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argued that every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. There is truth to this. Some soldiers do go to war expecting an exciting adventure. Some don’t expect to be killed or even think about their chances of being killed. Some don’t dwell on […]

Across the United States and most of the developed world, there is a growing awareness of the problems caused by overconsumption of meat, and an attendant growth in vegetarians and vegans. One of the many campaigns to help spread awareness and moderate our diets is Meatless Monday. This program, endorsed by many public and private […]

My Sunday morning began with a Wall Street Journal article about Scrabble. The story, which featured scrappy young Nigerian players, underdog victories, and applications driving the most rigorous systematic analysis of the game to date, decided that the future of Scrabble lay in defensive play. It was one of the saddest, most depressing articles I’ve […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Drew Pham writes about the burn pit registry, Afganistan and cancer. Make sure to give it a read if you didn’t get a chance already. WBT Friends […]

It started with a cough none of us could get rid of. Sure I smoked. Lots of us smoked but the non-smokers had it too, even the fitness nuts that worked out all day. We all had that cough. Whatever refuse we had, we burned in a shallow pit at the center of our outpost. […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Two articles for Memorial Day: The first is in memory of some good soldiers who died in Mosul (and an extended attack on Christopher Hitchens). The second […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Adrian on Paraguay, the racial utopia that wasn't and America's bloodiest war. Editor’s Recommendations Politics Trump is not a Fascist. He is the first American version of the quintessential Latin-American caudillo. […]

The title, which I selected myself, is a trick. Most citizens of the United States of America know their war history. There's even a popular television brand dedicated to educating US citizens about war, and their country's role in it. So while it may surprise some to learn that the greatest loss of life during a single […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Adrian argues that you shouldn't stop talking to people just because they like Trump. WBT Friends Adrian's 2nd piece about enduring Ranger School for Task and Purpose. Editor’s […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Carson reviews David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting—find out why it might be worthwhile to think about the merits of forgetting. WBT Friends Peter Molin at Time […]

In At The Mind’s Limits, a series of essays reflecting on his time spent in the Nazi concentration camps, Jean Améry predicted that in one hundred years the murder of millions, carried out by “a highly civilized people,” will be lumped with countless other 20th century horrors and submerged in a general “Century of Barbarism.” […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Many people enjoyed watching a video of ISIS fighters getting blown up this last week. If this enthusiastic vouyerism made you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, you might be interested in this […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT David James weighs in on the German government's decision to prosecute comedian Jan Böhmermann and tells us why it's perfectly okay to mock a dictator. WBT Friends Matthew Komatsu reviews Brian […]

The German government, a coalition of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats, has decided to allow prosecution of one of its citizens, a comedian named Jan Böhmermann who read a poem which mocked Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey. This is because there is a law in Germany’s penal code that […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT David James reviews Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and Adrian Bonenberger argues memorizing policy does not magically make you a good leader. Editor’s Recommendations Advocacy 538 comes […]

(Originally published at The Hooded Utilitarian) The recent Paris Climate Conference has been called the last best chance for the leaders of the world, nations and multinational corporations, to agree upon a framework that can somewhat mitigate and limit the compounding effects of climate change. Some have commented that a best-case scenario for such an […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Adrian Bonenberger reviews Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots.  WBT Friends: AWP '16 has come and gone, with no less than eleven events focused on war writing. Peter Molin […]

What purpose does our economy serve—why do we seek greater profit? What does profit do for an individual, an institution, or a civilization? Does capitalism work in the way we imagine—and if not, what should we do about it? On its surface—literally, on the cover—Martin Ford’s 2015 book Rise of the Robots would appear to be […]

Wrath /ræθ/ noun             1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)             2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
         On WBT Michael Carson on Hamlet and History WBT Friends: One of our own editors, Matthew Hefti, wrote a novel called A Hard and Heavy Thing, which is structured […]

"But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions."  This Week on WBT: Adrian Bonenberger […]

It has come to my attention that there exists an award-winning Broadway musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton. Additionally, I recall an announcement a few months ago by the Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, that a woman will be chosen to appear on our paper currency for the first time ever in […]

Military hyperbole is at the heart of Serial’s second season. Sarah Koenig has gambled that she can take a simple premise—man walks off a base in Afghanistan, is captured by the Taliban—and make it representative. Of the war, of the world, of human nature. The season has discussed how Army private Bowe Bergdahl came to […]

Many Americans have been noticing, with more frequency, the inconvenient truth that our democratic system, by design, is actually not very democratic. The design was planned originally by the Founding Fathers who created the country–many of them owned actual slaves, and neither they nor women nor men below a certain economic class were allowed to […]

Photo Credit: J. David Ake, AP. Senator Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane. Regardless of what the official results might say, Bernie Sanders won the night in Iowa. The margin reported by most media outlets shows Hillary Clinton at 49.8% and Sanders at 49.6%, but there have been enough reports of shenanigans, voter fraud, and [...]

This essay is a short response to the great recent analysis on Socialism in America by my colleague on this website, Adrian Bonenberger. I was looking for ways I could critique his points but it is hard on the merits, I guess because we share more political opinions than I might had thought. Here are a few […]

Americans have become jaded by injustice. Wealthy and elitist citizens like Robert Durst and John du Pont bully, rape, and kill their way through life like Godzillas, law enforcement seemingly powerless to stop or even slow them. Meanwhile, poverty-stricken communities are treated like hostile territory, and then get to watch as their citizens are routinely treated […]

In a literary culture full of “McPoems” and hand-wringing over the homogenization of literature because of a supposed surplus of MFA programs, Bryan Hurt breaks the mold. He’s as educated as any creative writer out there, having studied under such luminaries as T.C. Boyle and Aimee Bender in the University of Southern California’s PhD program […]

By Adrian Bonenberger  I wrote a long essay about Lindsay Graham’s candidacy a few months ago, when Craig Whitlock broke the story about Graham’s sleazy and disingenuous military service (I choose my words very carefully—no enlisted man or officer who’s had to struggle for promotion can view Graham’s career and retirement with anything other than disgust). […]

It’s not a suicide note; it’s a love song.  Amazon • Barnes & Noble    

The long-awaited Paris Climate Accord has been finished and is widely reported to be the most successful and ambitious international climate agreement ever. The most important and cited number from the agreement is the goal of limiting the warming of the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is ambitious and a better result than […]

By Matthew J. Hefti I can’t count the number of variations I’ve seen on this meme on social media. It has reached the point where I feel compelled to write about it, which means the ignorance it encourages has sufficiently annoyed me. I’m a vet, I have a lot of vet friends, and I have […]

The Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote the following lines in his great work On Liberty: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” Mill, a Member of Parliament with the Liberal Party, was a proponent of almost unlimited […]

Today, November 24th, 2015, Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois. We all should be charged for the same thing. I won’t argue with anyone who wants to call Jason Van Dyke a bad apple, but the problem is larger than that. The problem–the problem […]

I started preparing this essay a month or two ago to collect my thoughts about the after effects of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and how the limits of free speech are being tested as extremism and intolerance increase in Europe and America. Now, the latest attacks in Paris on November 13th have made me reevaluate […]

Killing is the easiest thing in the world, easier than sex. Easier than raising a family or bringing a child into the world, or building a house. Easier than painting or writing or music. Killing is easier than sleeping. Before November 13th I couldn’t have told you how 9-11-2001 felt. Watching the attacks in Paris, […]

  The tired, simplistic, bargain-basement Cold War narrative of WWII sucks and it’s time we got over it. According to my eighth grade history teacher, the USA won WWII by beating the Nazis and the Japs. If we hadn’t beaten them, they would’ve conquered the world. That’s how the story goes, and many board games […]

  Dear NRA Members, 2nd Amendment lovers, Fraternal Order of Police members, legislators, judges, voters, prosecutors, federal agents, state agents, municipal agents, county sheriffs, veterans of foreign wars, and anyone else who gives even a scintilla of a— Pardon me. Let me start over. This needs to be bigger than that. This needs to be […]

 “The Thankful Poor”, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1894 Last month in The Atlantic, Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Al Aswany wrote an excellent essay on How Literature Inspires Empathy. He gives an example from a sentence in Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead (“He, also, had a mother”) to show how a single word makes the […]

2015.09.06, Labor Day

Dear America,

You inspire me into a coma. 

Gun violence is deeply entrenched in America. Chances are, if you’ve spent any time outside the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the last 30 years, you’ve been touched by gun violence personally—someone you’ve met or know personally has been hurt or killed by guns. It’s a problem that affects us all. It’s also a […]

One month ago, on July 24, 2015, the sixth and final Messner Mountain Museum opened to the public on the top of a mountain in northern Italy, a couple hours from where I live. This newest museum is a futuristic design by an Iraqi architect, and is the brainchild and property of famed mountaineer Reinhold […]

A piece about who finds zombie narratives compelling and why.

Herodotus begins his great work by tracing the historical origins of the Persian War to myths involving conflict between Europe and Asia, such as the rape of Io and Europa by Zeus, the story of Jason and Medea, and the abduction of Helen by Paris (which sparked the Trojan War). Thus, the first recording of […]

  During my first tour in Afghanistan in 2005, I was one of those who still thought that the war was justified and worth fighting. The search for bin Laden was ongoing and America held (or was perceived to hold) the moral high ground after quickly expelling the terrible Taliban and the terrorist network they […]

A confluence of recent events has led to the practice of capital punishment in America becoming a matter of greater public interest and debate for the first time in several decades. Foremost among these events is the trial and sentencing of the younger of two brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing. Another is the undiminished […]

They’re rebuilding Prussian Berlin. Not exactly the way it was before World War II, but Prussia is unquestionably the inspiration. The city is unified, the country is unified, and for the first time in the 21st century, there is a desire to rediscover a German narrative beyond the horrors spawned by World War II. Construction […]

How World War II gets remembered isn’t accurate, and for Curzio Malaparte, it's not even true. Not the American version, not the Russian, not anywhere, really. At best, our memory of WWII has become a lie founded on emotional connections to people barely known in life. A series of well-intentioned miscommunications and words spoken (or not) in German, Italian, Russian, […]

 There aren’t many “literary” fiction books out about Afghanistan, and almost none authored by veterans. Brian Castner, a veteran of Iraq, published an essay in Los Angeles Review of Books that examines the phenomenon in more depth. Roy Scranton, another veteran of Iraq and a philosopher, claims in a different LARB essay that there are […]

“Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.” These are lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” about the British cavalry charge in the 1854 Battle of Balaklava during the Crimean War. That […]

America has a problem with violence, and specifically gun violence. This is a fact, not an opinion, and is confirmed with a glance at the statistics, backed up as well by abundant anecdotal evidence. On any given day or week I can cite the latest example of the most publicized gun shooting or campus massacre. […]

After war, most societies look for love. Instead of dealing with the various manifest issues that remain after years of chaos and wanton murder, they seek the understanding and hope that can only be provided by stories based on faith, something greater than the brutal logic of expedience. A certain type of story presents love as a […]

With so much incredible, breakthrough writing happening at The Wrath Bearing Tree this year, the editors wanted to set a moment aside from their around-the-clock analysis of emergent (and urgent) intellectual issues to publish a curated list of the site's best contributors this year. The editors used number rankings that took a great number of objective variables […]

Brad Pitt loves playing in WWII movies. He loves fighting Nazis, who, incredibly, really existed, and were (if anything) even more evil than comes across on a movie screen. For 12 years, one of the most civilized, technologically and institutionally advanced countries on earth was ruled by a brutal, vicious band of thugs who employed racial mythology, […]

We have recently passed the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, which has occasioned a fair amount of press coverage looking back at the so-called (and ill-named) “Great War” or “War to End all Wars”. I intend to join this chorus with some of my own thoughts. For many people interested in […]

American Sniper, a new film based on the book of the same name, is being released on Christmas Day. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring and produced by Bradley Cooper, it tells the story of Navy SEAL super-sniper Chris Kyle, widely-praised as the most lethal sniper in American history with at least 160 “official” kills, […]

By now everyone in the world has heard about the recently released U.S. Senate Torture Report, which details the shocking and mind-numbing inhumanity of the torture program sanctioned by the Bush administration and operated by the C.I.A. after 9/11. With the appearance of this new report, there has been an enormous amount of press coverage […]

Let’s be honest about racism. It’s here. And it’s not going anywhere. But its prevalence is surprising, again, if we’re being honest: we’ve been under the mistaken impression, for some time, now, outside the ghetto, outside poverty-stricken areas and urban centers (I’m using white code for places that black people live) that America is a fundamentally […]

I have the solution to the full-blown crisis in the Middle East, and as usual, America is the only country that can do it right. Russia has the resources, but let’s face it – they’re too fundamentally disorganized and sentimentalist to make it happen the way it needs to. No, only America can solve this […]

We never meant things to get out of hand the way they did in Iran. Let's agree about that to begin with, let's agree that the CIA's role in replacing a democratically elected but left-leaning leader in the 1950s with a dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was understandable in the context of Persia's vast oil fields, and […]

It’s sad when you already know what people are going to say when you tell them that staying in Afghanistan today is as stupid and pointless now as it was in 2003, or 2009, or 2011. They’re going to say “but look what happened in Iraq,” relying on their audience’s lack of understanding of or […]

I read a piece on Vox recently (compliments of former roommate and exceptional human being Damien Spleeters) the point of which was to disabuse readers of “myths” surrounding the Islamic State. The piece had a useful goal: to educate readers about the Islamic State, presumably so the reader could make more reasonable decisions about whether or […]

Hollywood does not know how to make a film about war. This has been proven on so many different occasions, often averred on this blog, across the spectrum of time and experience, that I almost wonder why I’m bothering to write another essay on the subject. There are other projects I could be working on – […]

There are two substantial issues facing the American military and veteran community today. The first, a logical and narratively unified reaction to years of hero-worship, is a backlash against the impulse to thank soldiers for their service – a tendency, made explicit in recent media pieces, to vilify veterans and stigmatize them as prone to […]

Thought experiment. Someone you know, and who knows you, but not very well, says in public that you have no integrity. Like this: “You have no integrity. Zero. None. That’s what I think. This is my serious face.” How would you respond? Take a second with that thought. According to a piece in Guernica, during […]

Vanished, Wil S. Hylton’s book about the search to identify and return servicemembers’ remains to their families – no matter the obstacle – is a compelling read. It’s a non-fiction account, something between a mystery and a history, and is very well written. It took me three days to finish, and I was going hard, […]

The suicide bomber came from the wrong direction. He drove a maroon Toyota Corolla into the middle of a group of Afghan police and militia – just an hour into a massive  operation to help defeat the Taliban – and brought everything to a screaming stop. His car was packed with screws, nuts, nails, pots, […]

The most important compromise that allowed for the passage of the U.S. Constitution was that there be included a series of amendments called the Bill of Rights, which guaranteed certain freedoms to the individual, a counterpoint to the Articles of the Constitution itself which merely delineated the powers of the branches of government. The most […]

We recently witnessed the 50th anniversary celebration of the famous 1963 “March on Washington”, which was a peaceful gathering in the nation’s capital to advocate for Civil Rights for African-Americans. The original event climaxed with the magnificent speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called the “I Have a Dream” speech, and rightly considered the […]

Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, tribalism, nationalism, parochialism, xenophobia, jingoism, bigotry, intolerance, hatred. These are the topics to be discussed presently. I was inspired to write this after reading a short essay by Sartre called “Portrait of an Antisemite,” and realizing that all forms of bigotry are connected and share the same pathologies and deficiencies. Firstly, […]

Some useful acronyms by which to understand 21st century conflict: COIN: Counter Insurgency. Employed by ISAF in Afghanistan from 2003-2010. Broadly speaking, the strategy wherein a friendly force competes with an enemy force for the allegiance and support of a largely-neutral population. Unattractive to militaries because of the numerous paradoxes involved in successfully pursuing the […]

We have collectively learned much in the last couple years about a secret and frightful new war machine — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, aka drones. That is a topic for another day, however. The new awareness has generally increased since 2011, a year which witnessed the unexpected assassination of America’s greatest terrorist nemesis, as well as […]