Life on a Tube Filled With Seamen

Military life has long served as reliable fodder for American literature, which should come as no surprise: something about stories of men from all corners of the country facing danger as a team is inherently dramatic. From Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (the brutal Vietnam memoir that served as source material for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket), authors have mined the ups and downs of military life not just to shine a light on what makes those institutions — and the people who work them — tick, but also the American experience as a whole. Sometimes this even takes a comic turn, as seen in Joseph Heller’s satirical masterpiece, Catch-22, or Neil Simon’s autobiographical play Biloxi Blues, which documents his stint in the U.S. Army (with plenty of gags thrown in for good measure).