War Stories: 13 Modern Writers Who Served in War
War is one of the most common themes in literature. Indeed, some of the earliest great literary works are epics recounting the events or aftermath of a war. The Iliad, traditionally said to have been composed by the Greek poet Homer in the 8th century bce, is an epic poem about the Trojan War. Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725–675 bce) tells of a warrior’s wanderings for 10 years after that war. Numerous writers who served in wars of the 20th and 21st centuries have recounted or drawn from their experiences to produce great modern works of fiction, poetry, and memoir.
Ernest Hemingway
- Service: American Red Cross, World War I (1914–18)
- Recommended read: A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Hemingway began his writing career as a reporter in the Midwest after graduating from high school. Fascinated with war, he tried enlisting in the military, but he was repeatedly rejected because of an impaired eye. During World War I, however, he served as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. In 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. He was decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, where he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse who declined to marry him. These experiences were fictionalized in his seminal novel A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway also served as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and World War II (1939–45), during which he flew several missions with the British Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6, 1944). War and its impact on the lives of veterans and their intimate relationships are also themes of his novels The Sun Also Rises (1926), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and Across the River and into the Trees (1950). Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Siegfried Sassoon
- Service: British army, World War I (1914–18)
- Recommended reads: The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918)
Sassoon enlisted in the British army in 1914 during World War I and was twice wounded seriously while serving as an officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in France. He was awarded the Military Cross for rescuing another wounded soldier during combat, but his war experience led him to make a public affirmation of pacifism in a letter that was read out in the British House of Commons. Sassoon’s strong denunciation of war (“I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it”) was explained away as “shell shock,” a neurotic condition caused by the stress involved in warfare.
Yet, Sassoon’s eloquent rage and protest against war were no temporary condition. His poetry graphically recounts the brutality of warfare, takes satiric aim at military generals, and laments the deaths of fellow officers and the emotional aftermath of war. Sassoon also wrote autobiographical works about his military experiences, such as The Memoirs of George Sherston (1928–36) and Siegfried’s Journey (1945). Over time, his poetry became more devotional, and in 1957 he converted to Roman Catholicism.
Wilfred Owen
- Service: British army, World War I (1914–18)
- Recommended read: The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1965), edited by Cecil Day-Lewis
Owen was a poet who initially modeled his work after that of the great English Romantic poet John Keats. In 1915 he enlisted in the British army, and the following year he was sent to France with the Lancashire Fusiliers to fight in the trenches in World War I. In his first six months of battle in 1917 his troop was gassed with poison and forced to sleep in an open field of snow. Owen witnessed fellow soldiers being blinded from their injuries. He suffered a concussion after a fall, and, in another incident, he spent several days huddled in a foxhole near the body of a soldier who had been killed.
In June 1917 Owen was sent home because of his wounds and was hospitalized in Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon. He soon began writing many of his most celebrated poems. Indeed, Owen’s experiences in battle had a profound effect on his work. In poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Strange Meeting,” he describes warfare in visceral language. His war poems helped lay the foundations for the Modernist era in poetry. In August 1918, however, he was sent back to battle in France. He was killed in action in November, one week before Armistice Day. After his death, Sassoon had a crucial role in publishing Owen’s poems.
George Orwell
- Service: Spanish Republican militia, Spanish Civil War (1936–39)
- Recommended read: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Born in India, the son of a British officer in the Indian civil service, Orwell initially decided to follow family tradition in his choice of career. After a boarding school education in England, in 1922 he went to Burma (now Myanmar) to serve in the Indian Imperial Police, but he resigned in 1928 after becoming ashamed of British rule of the Burmese people and of his role as a colonial police officer. Pursuing a career as a writer, he traveled throughout Europe to report on social and political conditions. His writing took him to Spain to report on the Civil War, where he joined the Republican militia and rose to the rank of second lieutenant before becoming seriously wounded at the Teruel front. In May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists, who were trying to suppress their political opponents, Orwell was forced to flee Spain. A year later he published a vivid account of his experiences, Homage to Catalonia.
In World War II (1939–45) Orwell was rejected for service in the British military and instead headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Orwell’s other works addressing war, fascism, and totalitarianism include Coming Up for Air (1939) and, most famously, the political fable Animal Farm (1945) and the harrowing novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).
Joseph Heller
- Service: U.S. Air Force, World War II (1939–45)
- Recommended read: Catch-22 (1961)
Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. During World War II he flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier in Corsica. After the war, he attended New York University on the G.I. Bill, earned a master’s degree (1949) at Columbia University, and studied at Oxford University as a Fulbright scholar. He worked a variety of jobs while writing fiction. His debut novel, Catch-22, is considered one of the most significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II.
Centering on the antihero Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an airstrip on a Mediterranean island during the war, the novel portrays the airman’s desperate attempts to stay alive. The “catch” in Catch-22 involves a mysterious U.S. Army Air Forces regulation asserting that a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions. But, if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Heller’s novel was so popular that catch-22 entered the English language as a term to describe a proviso or situation that trips one up no matter which way one turns.
Ōoka Shōhei
- Service: Imperial Japanese Army, World War II (1939–45)
- Recommended read: Taken Captive (1948) and Fires on the Plain (1951)
Born in Tokyo in 1909, Ōoka studied French literature at Kyōto University and was influenced by the French writer Stendhal, whose works he translated into Japanese. In 1944 he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army and deployed to the Philippines. The following year he was captured by American soldiers, and he spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp on the Philippine island of Leyte.
Ōoka’s imprisonment left him struggling with guilt and shame, and his writing became a means of catharsis for him. His first book, Furyoki (1948; Taken Captive: A Japanese POW’s Story), is a memoir of his experiences in which he examines the deep dishonor and psychological conflict felt by the Japanese POWs of World War II. For this work he was awarded the Yokomitsu Riichi Prize. Ōoka’s best-known novel is Nobi (1951; Fires on the Plain), which tells the story of Tamura, a sick Japanese soldier wandering in the Philippine jungles in the aftermath of the war who eventually loses his sanity and is saved by his Christian faith. The novel won the Yomiuri Prize and ranks with the finest works of war literature. The book also inspired other writers such as J.G. Ballard.
Günter Grass
- Service: German Waffen-SS, World War II (1939–45)
- Recommended reads: The Tin Drum (1959) and Peeling the Onion (2006)
Born in 1927 in the free city of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), which Germany took possession of in 1939, Grass became the literary spokesman for the German generation that grew up in the Nazi era and survived World War II. His reputation as a writer was made with his first novel, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum). Written in a variety of styles, it imaginatively distorts and exaggerates Grass’s experiences—the Polish-German dualism of Danzig, the creeping Nazification of average families, the attrition of the war years, the coming of the Russian army, and the complacent atmosphere of West Germany’s postwar “economic miracle.” In 1999 Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In 2006, however, Grass published a memoir, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), in which he revealed that he had been part of the Hitler Youth movement as a teen, was refused as a volunteer for submarine duty in the German military at age 15, and was called up to the Waffen-SS (the elite military wing of the Nazi Party) at age 17. He was wounded in battle and became a POW in 1945. As a POW, he was forced by American troops to march through the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau. After his memoir ignited controversy, Grass explained his reasons for writing it, saying, “It had to come out finally. It will stain me forever.”
Kurt Vonnegut
- Service: U.S. Army, World War II (1939–45)
- Recommended read: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Vonnegut was a writer for his high-school newspaper in Indianapolis and, later, a biochemistry major at Cornell University when World War II broke out. He left college in 1943 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and he was deployed to Europe the following year. During his service, he was captured by the Germans and was one of the survivors of the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. After the war Vonnegut worked as a reporter and a public relations writer before turning to fiction writing. His work became noted for its use of satire and postmodern techniques, as well as elements of fantasy and science fiction, to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization.
In 1969 Vonnegut published the novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade, which draws on his Dresden experience and cemented his reputation as a major contemporary writer. In the novel, Vonnegut crafted an absurdist nonlinear narrative in which the bombing raid serves as a symbol of the cruelty and destructiveness of war through the centuries. Critics lauded the book as a modern-day classic, and it won the 1970 National Book Award for fiction.
Richard Hooker
- Service: U.S. Army Medical Corps, Korean War (1950–53)
- Recommended read: MASH (1968)
Richard Hooker is the pseudonym for H. Richard Hornberger, an American surgeon who wrote MASH, a humorous war novel that is based on Hornberger’s experiences as a U.S. Army doctor in the Korean War. Hornberger began writing the novel in 1956, modeling the character of Dr. Benjamin Franklin (“Hawkeye”) Pierce on himself and balancing comical elements with descriptions of the serious challenges faced by army medics and doctors during wartime. Three years later, he finished the novel and began shopping it around to publishers, with no success.
In 1967 Hornberger enlisted the help of a sports journalist and former war correspondent, W.C. Heinz. They spent a year cowriting and shaping up the novel, and in 1968 the book found a publisher. Two years later it was adapted into a critically acclaimed antiwar film directed by iconoclastic filmmaker Robert Altman and written by Ring Lardner, Jr. Although Hornberger was politically conservative, he liked the movie despite its countercultural bent, because it hewed closely to the spirit of his book. In 1972 the film was adapted into a television series that became one of the most popular TV shows ever. This time, however, Hornberger took issue with Hawkeye, his literary doppelgänger, being portrayal by liberal actor Alan Alda.
Tim O’Brien
- Service: U.S. Army, Vietnam War (1954–75)
- Recommended reads: Going After Cacciatio (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990)
After graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1968, O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and sent to basic training in Washington state. Opposed to the war even before being drafted, O’Brien considered going AWOL to Canada, but fear kept him from doing so. In 1969 he was deployed to Vietnam, where he rose to the rank of sergeant before returning to the United States in 1970. After working a few years as a journalist, he collected his articles and essays in the nonfiction book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973).
O’Brien then published several acclaimed novels. Going After Cacciato, which won a National Book Award, follows both a soldier who abandons his platoon in Vietnam to try to walk to Paris and a fellow infantryman who escapes the war’s horrors by inventing elaborate fantasies about his journey. The Things They Carried centers on a fictional narrator named Tim O’Brien who begins his memoir with a description of the items that the members of his platoon took to war, which range from physical objects, such as weapons and love letters, to emotions of terror and homesickness. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2013 O’Brien received the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.
Yusef Komunyakaa
- Service: U.S. Army, Vietnam War (1954–75)
- Recommended reads: Dien Cai Dau (1988) and Neon Vernacular (1993)
Born James William Brown, Jr., in 1947 in rural Louisiana, Komunyakaa changed his name in tribute to his grandfather from the West Indies. In 1969 Komunyakaa enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Vietnam, where he served as a war correspondent (and later an editor) for The Southern Cross, a military newspaper. He earned a Bronze Star and returned to the United States. With support from the G.I. Bill, he attended the University of Colorado, where he began writing poetry.
Komunyakaa published several collections before thoroughly delving into his war experience in Dien Cai Dau, the title being Vietnamese for “crazy.” The term was used by Vietnamese civilians to describe American soldiers. The collection contains one of his most anthologized poems, “Facing It,” in which Komunyakaa describes visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the first time and being confronted by traumatic memories of the war. Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, also features poems addressing war.
Ron Kovic
- Service: U.S. Marines, Vietnam War (1954–75)
- Recommended read: Born on the Fourth of July (1976)
Kovic grew up on Long Island in New York and has described his childhood as one devoted to religious faith and patriotism. In 1964, soon after graduating from high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. The following year he was deployed to Vietnam, and after his tour of duty he signed up for a second one, believing in the necessity of stopping the spread of communism in Vietnam. His second tour was extremely traumatic: he accidentally shot and killed a fellow soldier, witnessed the slaying of Vietnamese women and children by American troops, and was shot by enemy fire, resulting in his becoming paralyzed from the chest down. Kovic was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart medal, but his trauma was only heightened by the dire conditions in veterans’ hospitals. After a period of depression, Kovic committed himself to the antiwar movement and the fight for veterans’ rights.
In 1976 Kovic published Born on the Fourth of July, a memoir of his war experience and his activism. Kovic’s story inspired rocker Bruce Springsteen to write “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984), a song about the U.S. government’s poor treatment of Vietnam veterans. In 1989 Born on the Fourth of July was adapted into a film by Oliver Stone (who had also served in Vietnam). On the last day of filming, Kovic gave his Bronze Star to Tom Cruise, who played Kovic in the movie.
Phil Klay
- Service: U.S. Marines, Iraq War (2003–11)
- Recommended reads: Redeployment (2014) and Missionaries (2020)
Klay was born in Westchester, New York, in 1983 and attended Jesuit schools before studying creative writing at Dartmouth College. Shortly after graduating from college in 2005, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. In January 2007 he was deployed to Iraq, where he served in the Iraq War as a public affairs officer in Anbar province until February 2008. After returning home, he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Hunter College.
Klay’s first book, Redeployment, is a collection of short stories that explore such themes as trauma, guilt, and faith. In 2015 the book won the National Book Award for fiction. Klay’s debut novel, Missionaries—a sprawling complex story set in the United States, the Middle East, and Colombia after the attacks of September 11, 2001—was selected by former U.S. Pres. Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020. In 2022 Klay released Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War, which drew praise for its engrossing and introspective essays on how decades of involvement in foreign wars after September 11 have affected Americans’ sense of citizenship.