Only a few years ago, it looked as if we’d closed a chapter in our nation’s history, and were set to wind down two wars. Remember the time before ISIS, when we were leaving Iraq? Remember when the surge so pressed the Taliban that we could justify leaving the Afghans to fend for themselves? The authors of this anthology remember that time very well; many of them were still serving on active duty. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—the longest in our nation’s history—are their wars. They saw what it meant to take part in the first all-volunteer war, the first war where women played such prominent and widespread ground-combat roles, and first where the heavy moral, financial, and emotional costs were borne by such a small percentage of the American people.
Many firsts, but this war yielded another superlative that receives far less attention. America has never before, by any measure, fought a war with such a well-educated force. Not only do soldiers have unprecedented technical skills, but many are also steeped in war literature, readers already well-versed in the canon from Hemingway to Herr. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is an entrenched high school standard for the generation of men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. They knew what a war story looked like even before they put rifles over their shoulders and marched, drove, or flew to battle.
Modern life is faster, more complex, more quickly changing than ever before. So why not also the development of the veteran writers making sense of these conflicts? We should not be surprised that war literature is evolving at such an unprecedented pace. The first-draft-of-history now gives way to deep reflective fiction in only a few years; readers waited decades for the equivalent after World War II or Vietnam.
Which is to say that the stories you are about to read are more thoughtful, empathetic, generous, and fantastic than any we’ve ever had from veterans of a war that is still ongoing. We are all of us accelerated.
Stories and narrative are powerful subtle things. They can smother strict history. The screaming horses of All Quiet on the Western Front convey the horrors of trench warfare more effectively than any stack of statistics. But this myth-making ability can be deceptive. When Americans talk about war literature, for example, what we really mean is Western war literature. How many of us have read a World War I story by a former member of the Russian Empire, let alone its Ottoman rival? How many stories can you name by Japanese, Chinese, or Siamese participants in World War II? And who gets to tell “authentic” war stories, the kind that transcend fact? Combat veterans? All veterans? Family members and friends? Citizens of the country that sent them?
Any writer who uses “veteran” to describe him or herself bears a burden of authenticity. The average reader—who, unlike us brooding war writers, occasionally puts down Caputo and Salter to enjoy celebrity chef tell-alls and vampire romance young adult novels—can mistakenly assume that when a veteran tells a war story, they are definitively saying this is how it was, as opposed to this is how it was for ME, or, in the case of many stories, this is how I imagine it was for someone else. Yes, we use our imaginations too; note stories in this collection like Kristen Rouse’s “Pawns,” about Afghan truck drivers, or Brandon Willitts’s “Winter on the Rim,” about a grieving widow, or Matt Hefti’s “We Put a Man in a Tree,” about the haunting dead.
These stories will not be the last word on the wars. Narratives evolve, and though the pace quickens, the depth and breadth of the race expands, frustrating expectations of a finish line. Nothing in this anthology is definitive. The first books from Iraq and Afghanistan were largely shoot-’em-up memoirs, war-plan nonfiction by strategists and generals, and memoirs by conflict reporters like Sebastian Junger. When the Iraq War portion of this conflict appeared to end in 2010, the fiction that appeared soon after was retrospective. That’s what it felt like, at the time.
This collection, on the other hand, was written during the rise of the Islamic State and Boko Haram, Iran’s emergence as a major regional power, and the resurrection of Russia as a source of funding for proxy wars. This anthology was written and edited after the invasion of Ukraine, while China built islands in the South China Sea, and while the USA expanded its footprint in Syria and Iraq. For the first time in our lives, we are beginning to realize that Forever War might be more than hyperbole. A generation raised during the Clinton boom has seen war proliferate during adulthood, profitably so, and along lines that give one reason to believe, based on factual rather than narrative history, that we have more and greater conflict to expect, rather than less.
The stories in The Road Ahead respond to the imaginative challenge of a world accustomed to ceaseless conflict. Some soldiers come home from war, others return again and again. Some civilians flee while others are left stuck in a perpetual violent limbo. Ask us for a solution to this conflict, or a prediction of the future, or even an explanation of how we as a country ended up here, and we present this book. It moves from particular to general, from real to surreal, from the thing as it is to the thing as it could be.
Another anthology with another perspective from editors who just shed the uniform will surely follow, by voices and from a time and context we cannot imagine today.
Without the work that came before it, this collection would surely not exist, and so we owe a number of debts of gratitude.
To Phil Klay, whose National Book Award–winning collection Redeployment not only established the short story as the preferred medium to examine these wars, but also set a mark for the rest of us to aspire to.
To the editors and contributors of Fire and Forget, the breakthrough anthology of war fiction to arise from Iraq and Afghanistan and an inspiration to the editors of this volume. We learned that while taking on such a challenge was probably a fool’s errand, sometimes that fool’s errand ends up being necessary.
To the community of veteran writers that almost universally work to support and develop each other’s craft. This network takes many forms—writing workshops like Words After War, the veteran-themed reading series at the Old Stone House and Voices From War, yearly meet-ups at AWP—but the end result is clear: when we solicited stories for this anthology, our issue was one of too many options, rather than too few.
A final note on the process of building such an anthology. Adrian Bonenberger conceived of the idea for a new fiction collection and initiated the first call to writers, and Brian Castner served as de facto managing editor, but during the submission phase, the compilation of stories for this anthology was the work of many hands. Teresa Fazio and Aaron Gwyn served as invaluable frontline editors, doing yeoman’s work on the first drafts of many of these stories. This volume would not exist without the voice and perspective of Teresa, and academic and craft expertise of Aaron. Art is a collective endeavor.
The editors, with gratitude—
Bonenberger
Castner
Fazio
Gwyn