After 11 years of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan and eight years in Iraq (where the war is now, officially if only ostensibly, finished), fiction writers have begun to address the campaigns. To paraphrase the philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, they may not be the war novels we want, but they’re the war novels we have. If they tell us little about the disaster that has been America's post-9/11 foreign policy, we learn much about how these wars changed our country and the soldiers tasked with fighting on our behalf. Above all, they speak to the vast disconnect between the lives of U.S. soldiers and those of us back at home, most of whom were able to live the last decade oblivious to the utter carnage wreaked upon Afghanistan and Iraq.
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