“FRAGO” was first published and collected and is currently most readily available in Redeployment (Penguin).

I've always had a low tolerance for violent movies. A band of college classmates once dared me to attend a late-night screening of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and took bets on how soon I'd leave; I fled before the end of the opening titles. When it comes to the suspension of disbelief, I'm a pushover. Turn down the lights and I am in: I am in deep.

The experience of enduring contrived horror, especially theatrical carnage for its own sake, has never been entertaining to me. It horrifies me, pure and simple. Yet for years I went to war movies, and what is war if not the apogee of horror? It may seem necessary or unavoidable, call for courage and cunning and stamina and sacrifice and nerves of steel—the conventional tropes are endless—but to wage war is to flout the sanctity of life. Respect for history, however, demands that we look war square in the face. I remember how apprehensively I stood in line for Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Das Boot, The Deer Hunter, Glory, Gallipoli—but I watched them from beginning to end (if now and then shielding my eyes). A few of them I saw twice. These were the war movies of my twenties and thirties; most of them focused on Vietnam. At least for Americans, it was a time of relative peace, a lofty place from which to probe our collective conscience.

But when, at thirty-nine, I had a son, war movies became unbearable. Every soldier onscreen was a onetime infant, a child whose mother stood to suffer inconsolable loss. (Saving Private Ryan? Not in a million years.) Then, just months after having my second son, I and my family lived through 9/11 in Lower Manhattan—and watched our country go to war. As we all know, American soldiers—and by national identity, the rest of us—have been continuously at war now for nearly two decades.

A few years into our long-term “engagement” (interesting how betrothal and battle share that word), American novels and stories about our many wars, past as well as present, began to proliferate.