WAR
Global War on Terror (GWOT)
9 books
The GWOT reading list is the most contemporary on this site, which means it's the most likely to be read by people who were part of it — as soldiers, as family members of soldiers, or as citizens of the country that sent them. Nine books, covering the origins of 9/11, the CIA's role in creating the conditions for it, both wars from the journalism and the memoir and the fiction perspectives, the Afghan and Iraqi civilian experience, and the veteran's experience of coming home to a country that had moved on. The list takes the war seriously without taking any particular position on it — it is possible to honor the service and question the strategy simultaneously, and the best books here do exactly that. The humor entry, Kaboom, was written by a veteran, which is the only way it earns the right to be funny about any of this.
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The Looming Tower
Lawrence Wright
Wright spent five years interviewing FBI agents, CIA officers, and al-Qaeda members for this account of the road to September 11 — the rise of bin Laden, the development of al-Qaeda's ideology, the FBI-CIA intelligence failures that allowed the hijackers to operate inside the United States, and the specific bureaucratic turf wars that meant the two agencies weren't sharing information that might have stopped the attacks. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and remains the definitive account of how 9/11 happened — not as an act of inexplicable evil but as the product of specific decisions, specific failures, and a specific ideology with a specific history that the American government didn't take seriously until it was too late. The essential entry point for everything else on this list.
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Ghost Wars
Steve Coll
Coll traces the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion in 1979 — the arming of the mujahideen, the deliberate cultivation of radical Islamist fighters as Cold War proxies — through the Taliban's rise, bin Laden's return to Afghanistan, and the Clinton and Bush administrations' repeated failures to act on mounting intelligence about al-Qaeda. The book ends on September 10 2001, which is the most devastating editorial decision in recent American non-fiction. Everything that follows on this list is the direct consequence of everything Coll documents here. Won the Pulitzer Prize. The essential bridge from the Cold War into the GWOT, and the book that most honestly explains how America built the conditions for its own worst day.
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The Forever War
Dexter Filkins
Filkins covered both Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times from 2001 to 2006 and wrote this account — part memoir, part journalism, part something harder to categorize — of what both wars looked like from the street. The Battle of Fallujah chapter, in which Filkins embedded with the Marines during the November 2004 assault on the city, is one of the great pieces of war journalism ever written. The Afghanistan chapters document the country before and after the invasion with the authority of a man who had been reporting there since before 9/11. The title is the most accurate description of what the GWOT became — a war without clear objectives, clear enemies, or a clear end — and Filkins documents that quality with a precision no purely military history achieves. Bing West's No True Glory is the essential tactical companion for the Fallujah battle specifically.
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Lone Survivor
Marcus Luttrell
In June 2005, a four-man SEAL reconnaissance team was inserted into the mountains of Kunar Province to locate a Taliban commander. Compromised by local goatherds, debating whether to kill them, they released them — and were subsequently surrounded by 200 Taliban fighters. Three SEALs died. Sixteen more died in the rescue attempt. Luttrell was the lone survivor. The memoir he wrote covers the training that built him, the mission that nearly killed him, and the specific physical and moral demands the GWOT placed on the young men who fought it at the sharpest end. One of the best-selling military memoirs in American history for exactly the right reasons. Mark Owen's No Easy Day — the account of the SEAL team that killed bin Laden six years later — is the bookend this story deserves.
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Fiasco / The Gamble
Thomas Ricks
Two volumes, one complete account of the Iraq War's failure and partial recovery. Fiasco documents how the military victory of 2003 produced an insurgency the American military was institutionally unprepared to fight — the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the de-Baathification policy, the absence of post-war planning, and the commanders who understood counterinsurgency and were systematically ignored. The Gamble covers the surge of 2007-08 and the counterinsurgency doctrine that General Petraeus implemented — what worked after Fiasco documented what didn't. Ricks was the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent with sources at every level of the command structure, and the two books together are the most complete and most balanced account of Iraq's military and political arc available.
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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini grew up in Kabul, left before the Soviet invasion, and wrote this novel about an Afghan boy who betrays his best friend and spends the rest of his life trying to redeem himself — against the backdrop of Afghanistan from the 1970s through the Taliban era and the post-2001 reconstruction. Already on the Redemption list, it belongs here too as the essential Afghan civilian perspective: the country before the wars that the GWOT is the latest chapter of, the Taliban's specific brutality documented by someone who knew the Afghanistan it destroyed, and the experience of a diaspora watching their homeland unmade from the outside. The reader who finishes Ghost Wars and Filkins with the strategic and military picture now has the book that gives it a human face and a human cost.
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The Corpse Washer
Sinan Antoon
Antoon is an Iraqi novelist who left Baghdad after the 2003 invasion and writes about a young man from a family of traditional corpse washers — the men who prepare the dead for burial according to Islamic rite — who becomes the last practitioner of a dying profession as the bodies of the American occupation and the sectarian civil war pile up around him. Short, precise, and written with the specific authority of a man who knew the Baghdad that existed before the invasion and watched it disappear. The Iraqi civilian perspective that no American book on this list can provide — not political argument but the specific texture of ordinary life inside a society being dismantled, told through the most intimate work a human being can do. Cross-seeds into the Books on Death list.
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The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers
Powers served as a machine gunner in Iraq in 2004-05, came home, got an MFA, and wrote this novel about a young soldier who makes a promise to a dead comrade's mother and then has to live with what keeping it costs him. The achievement is writing about the Iraq War with the same literary seriousness O'Brien brought to Vietnam — the specific moral weight of combat decisions, the specific damage that sustained violence does to a young man's interior life, and the specific difficulty of returning to a country that has already moved on. Won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, finalist for the National Book Award. David Finkel's Thank You for Your Service documents the reintegration failure in non-fiction with equal honesty, and Phil Klay's short story collection Redeployment covers the full range of the Iraq experience from deployment through return — both belong on your reading list after this one.
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Kaboom
Matt Gallagher
Gallagher was an Army cavalry officer who blogged from Iraq in 2008-09, had his blog shut down by the Army for being too honest about what counterinsurgency doctrine looked like when applied to a situation counterinsurgency doctrine didn't fit, and turned the material into this memoir. The meetings with sheikhs that accomplish nothing, the interpreters who may or may not be trustworthy, the rules of engagement that change weekly, the specific absurdity of nation-building conducted by exhausted twenty-four-year-olds with rifles — Gallagher documents all of it with the controlled exasperation of a man who believed in the mission and watched the institution make it impossible. The humor entry that earns its place because only a veteran could have written it, and only a veteran will fully appreciate how accurate it is.