I recently read All Quiet on the Western Front and watched Band of Brothers. I’m really enjoying my journey into trying to understand our American veterans better. I’m a nurse and I feel that it is improving my empathy and understanding with this population.
I want books that give me insight into their psyche, humanize them, I want to cry for every one that has given their life. I’m not looking for American war propaganda/nationalism. I want to know how war shapes them into the people they are afterwards. Their struggles with readjusting into civilian society.
Thank you
by i-believe-in-nothing
7 Comments
You should probably try reading some non fiction if you want to actually accomplish your goal. I’d suggest Horses Don’t Fly by Fredrick Libby, To Hell and Back by Audie Murphy, and the Oddessy of Echo Company by Doug Stanton.
The Road Back is a quasi-sequel to All Quiet
The Things They Carried
Don’t Mean Nothing by Susan O’Neill (female nurses in the Vietnam War)
Johnny Got His Gun – by Trumbo – a nurse is involved but it’s not uplifting
Matterhorn – by Marlantes. – Excellent book. Top notch. About a reluctant lieutenant in Vietnam. He wrote a nonfiction book about the same deployment called What it is Like to go to War, also excellent.
Catch-22
With the old breed by Eugene sledge
If you’re open to nonfiction *War is a Force That Gives us Meaning* by Hedges is the book that mostly closely describes my own wartime experience–for whatever that’s worth. Despite the title it is in no way pro-war
“Generation Kill” by Evan Wright is more grimdark and depressing than tear-jerker. It’s an account by a reporter who was embedded with US marines during the invasion of Iraq, and Wright tries to explain the psychological effects it had on them. They went in expecting one kind of war, and encountered a completely different situation.
Salt to the sea and/or between shades of grey by Ruta Sepetys