“We go to war because of stories,” said the novelist Elliot Ackerman, who tells stories because he went to war.
He was thinking of Vladimir Putin redrafting history to justify Russia’s actions in Ukraine. But also of Iraq and Afghanistan, where he served five tours of duty as a Marine and C.I.A. paramilitary officer, awarded a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a Silver Star with a citation for “heroic actions” during the second battle for Falluja in 2004.
In his 2019 memoir “Places and Names,” Ackerman offered eviscerating details underlying that commendation, mindful of the men he had lost, the abandoned allies and missions gone wrong. He chose not to deploy a sixth time.
“You have to declare for yourself a separate peace,” he said recently.
The writer that the wars made of him has now taken an unexpectedly comic turn with his new novel, “Sheepdogs,” published by Knopf on Aug. 5.
In two memoirs and seven novels he has been reflective, elegiac, often ruefully nostalgic, at times quietly angry, always sternly principled, and analytical to the point of prophetic about what he considers pernicious developments at home and abroad.
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The post ‘War Is Too Serious to Take Seriously All the Time,’ So He Wrote a Comic Novel appeared first on New York Times.
