The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

John Bartle and Daniel Murphy are soldiers, no more than boys who signed up from their homes in rural Virginia to fight their country's war in Al Tafar, Iraq in 2005.   Bartle's first person narrative alternates between his experiences in Iraq and the year after his return to Virginia.  Powers' describes Bartle's increasing sense that although he was the only one to return from Iraq in a very real sense both he and Murphy died out there.  Powers speaks with painful beauty of the heat and dust of Iraq, the emotions suppressed as he killed not just men but also women and children, and how the trauma reduced him to a walking ghost on his return, unable to reconnect with those around him, plagued by flashbacks.  Powers' description of the true nature of depression is one of the best I have ever read and this is to my mind as beautiful an elegy for what is lost in war as Sassoon.

Dougie's War by Rodge Glass


Dougie Campbell has just returned from the war in Afghanistan. At first he does everything he has dreamed of, climbs a munro, goes to see Scotland play football at Hampden Park, and gets bought rounds and rounds of drinks by strangers and friends all of whom hail him as a hero. But as he is forgotten by the people around him and moves into a flat and life of his own the trauma he suffered as the sole survivor of an explosion that tore apart his jeep and the bodies of his friends emerges and takes over. A really good primer on the true cost of modern soldiering, on PTSD and the lack of support for returning soldiers, and with an in depth section on PTSD, the war in Afghanistan, the World War I comic strip Charley's War that first spoke about the reality of life for soldiers on the western front. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is that I feel it lack the subtlety and quality of drawing of Charley's War, but it is much shorter.