“Afghanistan veterans are writing and publishing,” observes Brian Castner, noting the many memoirs inspired by the conflict, but “they just aren’t publishing fiction”:
What impulse … is missing, that would cause a veteran to write fiction, as opposed to memoir? “Deep brooding dissatisfaction,” [Lieutenant Colonel Peter] Molin said, “more indicative of Iraq than Afghanistan. People have got to believe in what a novel can do, that more official forms of speech can’t.” In addition to teaching literature at West Point, Molin is an infantry officer who served as an advisor to the Afghan National Army in 2008 and 2009. And while he says that at times the Afghan War can feel endless,
the lived experience of average soldiers there is invigorating. They can come home feeling good about themselves. There were some horrible things that happened on my deployment, and yet my sense of satisfaction, maybe regrettably so, is actually pretty safe and solid.
The war itself in Afghanistan lacks the standard fiction catalyst that has propelled such writing since Vietnam, namely, in Molin’s words, “that little seed of despair and futility” that informs our understanding of Iraq.
“Iraq was such a disaster,” Molin continued, saying many veterans seem to come back with a “plague on both your houses” mentality.
The whole enterprise was overlaid with defeat and futility and amazement on the part of its participants, that they were involved in such a messed up endeavor. It was such a botched operation from the top down. People generally don’t feel good about their service in Iraq, and the writerly types and artistically minded types are left to question: what is my culpability, how has this affected me, I’ve been witness to all this and I’ve been subjected to all this, and it’s troublesome.
Previous Dish on American war literature since 9/11 here.
The Dish 