A recent contest held by Nicolas Kristof for Iraq War Poetry has been on my mind lately. He got the idea from reading Wilfred Owen and saw some kind of mental parallel between the war writers of the First World War and our own generation’s own war writers. II can see, at least superficially, what he means.

In all war writing there is a desire to get the experience of the soldier on paper and transmit a sense of what they consider a real experience to the public. Part venting and part informational, the war book is a collection of reminisces, thoughts, sometimes-profound ruminations, to show people what they author has seen in combat. Sometimes this is to prevent war, other times it is to memorialize the deeds of the dead. Sometimes it is political; it is about personal vendetta against poor officers and even poorer politicos that got us into some foreign mess to begin with. The war writer is, after all, a political being.

I have been thumbing through Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves this week. I read excerpts of it as an undergraduate but I never sat down and punched out the whole thing. It is similar to Sassoon’s Memoirs in topic and style, but Graves has more of what I would call a charming innocence in his story, one that is tarnished by the experience of war. You don’t find this in the same degree in Sassoon. Both are similar authors trying to authenticate the brutal reality of the trench war for the public in an attempt to show, to some degree, the folly and waste of modern war.

Message woefully not taken.

The war book is a tricky thing to do. In a much-anthologized essay entitled The Soldier as Novelist, Jonathan Vance surveys First World War lit as a historical and cultural phenomenon. He describes the emphasis by people like Graves and Sassoon to “get it real” to accurately reflect the visceral horror of trench life for their readers. Most veterans, it seems, preferred the work of more, I guess, romantic writers on war than that of Sassoon and company. This was because an anti-war spirit fueled their writing that many veterans thought that this pathos was a poor memorialization for the deeds of beloved lost comrades. The disillusion of war, though felt and written about by writerly types, wasn’t as common of a public belief among First World War veterans as you would believe from reading the surviving books. Vets were more interested in memorializing the dead and commemorating their victories than brooding over the terminal loss of a generation’s culture and youth.

There are parallels here between the First World War writers and those emerging from the Iraqi War. Literature has migrated from the First World War, from the modern to the Postmodern, though we can’t agree as a literary species on what that means exactly. Many Second World War vets turned authors sought to make modern war absurd and satiric (Vonnegut, Heller, Pynchon). Their biting cynicism was a profitable tonic for the boomer generation who wanted something confrontational, absurd, and sarcastic to match their phenomenal ability to sense the conspiracy in everything, especially Vietnam, which in their defense, was a conspiracy. So is the current war – the difference is that we are more interested now in the “real” than we are in the absurd, and the war writing emerging from the Iraqi War, with its emphasis on authenticity, is a throwback to the modernist movement.

Unlike writers of the Second World War, our war writers are introspective, have a sense of the real, and a journalist’s desire to transmit what they consider accurate information to a confused public. They are less interested in introspective craziness (Catch 22) and more into the very hard realities of life on the front lines (All Quiet on the Western Front). So far there have been many memoirs written and published from soldiers up and down the ranks. The emphasis on memoir and creative non-fiction is one of the strong parallels to First World War writing.

Though the genre remains the same, more or less, the medium for publishing art has changed completely from that of the early 20th century. Though the Pentagon cracked down on soldier bloggers a few years ago, there are lots of pages up from former soldiers writing about their experiences. War poetry has made it into the NY Times and NPR has diary entries from soldiers posted on its website and they are compelling essays. In order to get a name for your writing, you don’t have to be Robert Graves, with a posh public school turned soldier turned poet memoir, you can be a regular guy who saw some pretty bad shit in Iraq and wants to tell people about it on a blog. It’s unpretentious and its no less real than some of the “immortalized” writing. You don’t have to write the Iliad to get your point across. The important thing for this new generation of writers is the thing itself – the experience of war. In later works, we’ll see what that means.