http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9557174/site/newsweek/A young man, recently out of school and wanting to see the world, joins the military—and gets shipped to Iraq. In gutsy, sometimes profane prose, he takes you on a soldier's-eye view of the front lines of the war. Intrigued? You can read the full story in Colby Buzzell's "My War." Or in Nathaniel C. Fick's "One Bullet Away." Or in Jason Christopher Hartley's aptly titled "Just Another Soldier." All are being released by major publishing houses this week (Putnam, Houghton Mifflin and HarperCollins, respectively), and all are part of a slew of new first-person accounts by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. "The books are definitely reaching a crescendo," says Charlotte Abbott, senior editor at Publishers Weekly. "And I think we'll continue to see them come."
It's common to see books by retired generals, embedded reporters and terror experts. (PW counts 12 books about Iraq and 10 about terrorism coming out this fall alone.) But recently there's been a new crop of books by grunts on the ground—because there's an audience for them. John Crawford's memoir, "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell," was published in August and stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for three weeks. That kind of success story is turning soldiers into aspiring writers. "It's either try to be a writer or come home and park cars," says Buzzell, who parlayed a controversial blog that he wrote while on duty in Iraq into a book deal. "I get e-mails all the time from soldiers who want to see how they can become writers." But with increasing competition from fellow veterans, that, too, may be a battle.
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