stories

Last time I went to the library, I picked up War by Sebastian Junger and Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel. Karl immediately confiscated War. He is not interested in Thank You for Your Service, because, he says, "I'm living it."

He devoured War, which is easy to read, and tells a lot of Karl's stories. It tells universal war stories.  Someone raised his head during a firefight and he lived or he didn't. I have heard that story and also the story about the time the guys didn't get to shower for forty days. I have shaken my head at the story of the time the grunts came back from a mission and were scolded for going to the chow hall dirty and disheveled. It is a familiar book because I know all of the stories in it, even though it happened in Afghanistan, not Iraq, even though I have never heard of these men before.

The first book I ever read about soldiers was The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Before that I was only familiar with the blog Army of Dude, written by a guy my husband served with. Now I routinely pick up books about war and soldiers. More often than not, Karl reads them first. Once he reads a book, the chance of me reading it goes down drastically. Sometimes he tells me stories from the book, which I don't want to hear, because I want to read them. Sometimes he reacts too strongly and I just don't want to share his pain. After he read War, which he carefully did not recite passages from, he asked me to read it so we could talk about it.

I can't imagine what we're going to talk about though, because we've already talked about these stories. I have heard them all before.