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RWN subscribers have been asking the Nerd for some reading recommendations. Since no recommendation is any fun without also trashing other "best war novels" lists, this episode's war fiction survey begins with a survey of what the Beigeists are telling you to read, most of it wrong of course. After dispensing with those errors, the Nerd offers his summer reading recommendations, including some of the best sci-fi war novels. Lots to talk about . . . 

At 2:13:30 Ames recovers the first alleged Assad gas attack, in December 2012, when Assad's forces allegedly used the hallucinogenic nerve agent BZ gas on Homs rebels. That attack was thoroughly debunked, and forgotten evert since. Ames recovers the history of that first, fake Assad gas attack, who lied about it, and the origins of BZ gas in US counterinsurgency programs. 

Speaking of great war novels—don't forget to stock up on The War Nerd Iliad for your summer reading rations!

Total time: 3:04:06

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Oskaras Funk

New show dropping just as I'm about to do the laundry and various chores. Stellar timing!

Oskaras Funk

Also, could you please post a list of the books authors you speak of in the podcast? It's sometimes to remember and/or decipher the names from listening.

Avery

My opinion of Catch-22 was exactly the same as you guys. Maybe, from a historical perspective, it's the story of America's World War II camaraderie dissolving into cynicism... but as literature read today, it's a fairly shallow, privileged cynicism compared to the European WW2 experience.

Oliver Zhu

Are RWN episodes available on any platforms besides Patreon? Can't find it on iTunes or Stitcher, and I'm wondering because the Patreon app kind of sucks for playing audio.

Avery

You can get an RSS feed off of the Patreon page and plug it into your podcast app

Darryl Cooper

I enjoyed A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry, a novel written in the Irish lyrical style about an Irish teenager pulled up to fight in the WW1 trenches only to return home and find himself in the middle of an uprising that considers him a royalist collaborator.

teh_drewski

I don't think I've ever known anything was coming as much as I knew Old Man and the Sea was coming when the conversation turned to "shitty Hemingway"! I did enjoy Catch-22 as sort of a Western intro to that style of writing, I intend to check out Celine now.

mt

”Eastern egg hunt for undergrads” A classic!!! Hilarious! Thanks. A war book that is fantastic is The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna. It is essential reading for every Finn. published in English too.

Terje Eggestad

Given the list I'm thinking that the Saga of Egil Skallagrimson should at least have been a candidate.

Henry

Storm of Steel is basically Junger's memoir of his time in WWI. Pretty good, he had a lot of admiration for the Indian troops, does not get bogged down in "war is hell" at all.

Max

Funny thing about the firebombing of Dresden. It started a massive firestorm which killed tens of thousands. But why Dresden? Simple: they were trying to start a firestorm EVERY time, but they didn’t totally know how. Not even the great Tokyo raid was really a true self-perpetuating firestorm. Dresden just had the luck of the damned that night.

realBriannaWu

At 2 hours and 26 minutes in Mark mentions that the White Helmets cheered on Turkey's capture of Afrin. I just wanted to add that they selectively tended to people allegedly injured by the SDF and refused to tend to victims of Turkish attacks. <a href="http://theregion.org/article/13161-fractures-within-the-syrian-opposition-on-afrin-the-white-helmets-and-the-syrian-observatory-for-human-rights" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://theregion.org/article/13161-fractures-within-the-syrian-opposition-on-afrin-the-white-helmets-and-the-syrian-observatory-for-human-rights</a>

Edward P Slocomb

Perhaps it's considered light fare for a Very Serious War Nerd, but I'm rather fond of the collected papers of brigadier-general Harry Flashman (edited by George MacDonald Fraser).

Winterborn

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes - is my favourite straight war novel, Marlantes served as a Marine officer in said war but his novel was not published until 2009. Highly recommended.

Winterborn

Oh and if we're talking fantasy The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie is my favourite fantasy war novel. Love, love, love Book of the New Sun though.

A Patreon of the Ahts

Ay! The trick being GMF - unlike the rest of us wankers at the orgy - actually went down the street, around the block, and through the mill serving in WWII with the Brits fighting the Japanese in the jungle. What fun! And by 'fun' mean no fun....

Tupac Chopra

John, if you think unboxing videos are weird you should investigate the phenomenon of "mukbang" videos. Despite the name sounding vaguely NSFW, the topic is quite G-rated, if.... strange. I still don't get it, and I like to think that I am pretty plastic in my thinking. But if the South Koreans invented it, it's probably going to take over pop culture at some point.

Ben Hosen

Was just mulling cancelling Chapo only to see a recent episode I should check out first. Hope your appearance draws some new recruits over here!

Paul Vd

Should have an episode for just war books. What's your take on Antony Beevor ? He snuck into the Russian archives and broke open all the rape accusations of the red army. Good book though. Lots of rape in The Fall of Berlin. The Germans earned it

James Christensen

Ahmadou Kourouma's "Allah is not Obliged" and Lieve Joris' "the Rebel's Hour" are both very good. About West Africa and the Congo, respectively.

Dave Dolle

What about "The Siege" by Ismail Kadare? Love that book. Heard about it from the War Nerd.

Ross Jackson

No mention of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series?

Charles

Junger's detached manner is a great breath of fresh air. His writings of war stripped of humanity are in some strange way truer to the real thing.

Max

If they were unarmed and alive they were mere Nazi sympathizers, but if they were dead or raped always Full Nazi. Natural attitude towards civilians in America. They always deserve it no matter what because no matter what they do they are free game for being infected with evil thoughts. As though who kills or rapes and who gets killed and raped is less than 99% luck. What they don’t tell you is that the US and UK invented strategic bombing. The Germans didn’t do much of it, not because they were better but because they didn’t see it as good bang for the buck vs tactical aircraft. It’s a whiz-bang blank-check strategy for rich nations who think there’s some kind of shortcut to war by dropping bombs on civilians. The UK alone dropped 100x more tonnage on Germany than in all of the hideous blitz, largely at night with no possible discrimination on a coarser level than a city. The Americans tried harder but ended up going after a bunch of marshaling yards which were always in the dead center of a city.

Paul Vd

I can't reply to your post Brent but will do it here. Interesting take. I agree. I just made that inappropriate comment about the rape because really.. The Germans did rape their way in. It's eye for an eye. This whole rape thing is just another cats paw that the snob cvnt Anglosphere uses to dehumanize Russians. Russia was being open after the 90's and let Beevor in, & he took the archives and made Russia look bad with them. Typical

Max

Ironically the Russians were very open about it. The soldiers felt welcome to do it not least because Stalin told them as much as said they could have their very traditional share of the rape and pillage. It it was covered up, it had more to do with the Germans forgetting it quite intentionally.

Anders Olsson

Will there ever be a reprint of Pleasant Hell? I let some thief borrow my copy and it's been so long I can't remember who I lent it to, and now it's like a million bucks for a used copy. I want to reread it. Help!

Roger McCluskey

The tangent on sci-fi war novels made me think that John really, really needs to check out Liu Cixin’s “Three Body Problem” novels. They are imaginative and thoughtful about sci-fi conflict in exactly the best ways being described in this ep.

Pynchonfan84

Here's the list they came up with as best I could compile it. I may have missed one or two: Forever War - Joe Haldeman Lords of Light - Roger Zelazny Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe Chickenhawk - Robert Mason Journey to the End of Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine Lord of the Rings - Tolkien War of the Worlds - HG Wells The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing The Conspiracy - Paul Nizan Patriots - Sousa Jamba The Sergeant in the Snow - Mario Rigoni Stern The Citizen-Soldier: The Memoirs of a Civil War Volunteer - John Beatty The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov Castle to Castle - Louis-Ferdinand Celine The Three Kingdoms - Luo Guanzhong Shivaji - Ranjit Desai (not quite sure about this one, they didn’t mention the author by name) A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokov The Iliad - Homer Red Cavalry - Isaac Babel Empire of the Sun - JG Ballard If This is a Man - Primo Levi The Clay Machine-Gun - Victor Pelevin Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman One Soldier’s War in Chechnya - Arkady Babchenko

xnfec

I'm not widely read in this genre but I remember reading The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw which I found had interesting observations to make about soldiers in WW2. Shaw's comment on the film of the book, which starred Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift (I think) was "Great Film! Who wrote the book?" For modern science fiction try The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross - modern weaponry meets magical weapons. I did read Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves a long time ago. It is is a very short book as I recall. One recollection I have from it is his obervation at the end that the feeling among the soldiers at the end that it had not been allied prowess that had defeated the Germans but hunger. Graves was himself half German. Another is his observation of the filthy condition of the Portuguese trenches. When I was young, I read some childrens books set in air war in WW1. They were about a character called Biggles and were by a writer called Captain W.E. Johns. I still to this day recall technical details about the planes and tactics. A few years ago I was able to hold a Lewis Gun which was shown to me at the National Tank Museum at Bovingdon in Dorset. If you are going ancient, Gore Vidals book Creation has an interesting part about an Indian Army fighting around 500 BC. His book Julian about the apostate emperor has sections on ancient battles. Simon Scarrow's books about the roman Legions are good on the invasion of Britain and it's aftermath. Under the Eagle is the first. His brother, Alex Scarrow, wrote a specultative thriller where the Germans had developed the atomic bomb and formulated a plan for delivering it to New York. It is technically and war-nerdily very interesting. It is titled A Thousand Suns.

eh

Väinö Linna's Unknown Soldier is a good book about the Finnish participation in WW2, a kind of grassroots view of the initial euphoria and then the slow slide into disillusionment as the war drags out. His real masterpieces are the North Star trilogy though, a family chronicle about Finnish peasants might seem boring but it covers the period of Finnish independence and the civil war, and is as much about the repercussions on village life of the white terror and later the Lappo movement as anything else.

eh

Mary Lou Roberts' "What Soldiers Do" is a good reminder that there was plenty of that happening on the western front, and the brunt of it wasn't borne by Germans.

reid

thank you!

Terje Eggestad

HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean was probably my favorite war novel in my teens.

Evan McCalmon

As a entry from Asia, wondering what people think of Ha Jin’s War Trash.

Mark Ames

Thanks for this story. What do you know about The Region? Just looked them up, saw David Graeber is on their board. He's been a good consistent advocate for Rojava. Don't know the others.

realBriannaWu

I found out about The Region after they hired Mohammed Elnaiem as an editor a year or so ago. Had been following him for a while since (as far as I can tell) he's a pretty reliable source of information on Syria and Turkey and has decent politics. IIRC he went to Cambridge for grad school and focused on Kurdish politics. The Region also publishes Wladimir van Wilgenburg's reporting, and their website is blocked in Turkey. Wish I knew more about them. Tried looking up the website on WHOIS and everything is private.

Lewis Bowden

Dispatches by Michael Herr was a good one also. Doesn't glamorize "Our Boys".

radiowarnerd

Thanks! Sounds interesting. I just saw a New Yorker review says that it 'strains dutifully to illustrate political truisms'. What does that mean?

radiowarnerd

Thanks! On tech/magic battles, Michael Pollak just loaned us a set of this Graphic novel, Saga, that features two planets, one using military magic, the other military tech, eternally at war.

radiowarnerd

Thanks! That's better organized than I was!

radiowarnerd

I have! Finished the first book, started the second but--gotta be honest here--it kinda scared me. I think a lot of my favorite species (not talking about ours) are going to go graphically extinct in that second book when the Solarians arrive, and I don't want to see it.

radiowarnerd

Well, it's funny you should ask (as Delmar O'Donnell would say). Brendon and I are recording an audio version, the e-book will also be available when that's ready.

radiowarnerd

Honest question: is the ironic jingoism there as cover for real jingoism? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but my blood pressure is high enough already...

radiowarnerd

Ah, thanks very much. I'm always looking for good war novels from Africa.

radiowarnerd

That IS strange. I get the zit-popping ones, that's just plain porn. And I even sort of get the unwrapping thing, some kind of consumerist strip-tease. But watching someone else EAT, a non-relative...that seems almost too altruistic!

radiowarnerd

Thanks! For some reason I didn't know this one, but I'm on it.

radiowarnerd

Ah, you're right. I just didn't think of the sagas.

radiowarnerd

When I was young, the only honorable fate I could imagine was Grettir's, annoying everyone so much that I had to flee to that rock in the ocean where I could annoy the puffins and bash the fingers of anybody who tried to climb up.

radiowarnerd

You're the second person to recommend that; that makes it a definite.

Terje Eggestad

Any plans of dealing Viking age wars or Scandinavian wars? The Swedish war of independence is quite a good story. Straight out of game of thrones.

Terje Eggestad

Thought you'd like Egil' s saga as he saves himself from being executed by Erik the bloodaxe by writing a poem in Erik's honor.

Evan McCalmon

Not sure what that means. Seems like a lot of words to say one: history. And I wasn’t burdened by the voluminous research, either.

xnfec

My father saw me reading it (it was his copy) and asked me if I found it funny. I said I did and he replied that If I'd been in the services I'd have found it even funnier.

eh

Almost forgot one of my favorite war comics, Tardi's It was the war of the trenches, which got an English edition relatively recently. Great series of vignettes from the French front, with a kind of grim humor that owes a lot to Céline, like the episode where a Corsican peasant lunkhead goes to his death by firing squad for refusing to obey orders completely bewildered as he doesn't understand a word of French.

Boobs123

I don't know if anyone else mentioned this, but the dialogue from the alien patient in Book of the New Sun sounds like a fully realized - and then subverted - version of 1984's Newspeak. The guy can't open his mouth without praising his government and its ideology, but below the surface he can still express himself. The Group of Seventeen really should have included abbreviations.

MS

Great episode. An extra episode on more recent SF/fantasy war novels sometime would be even greater. The fantasy genre in particular has evolved a lot in recent years, mostly towards grittier/more cynical depictions of war. I'd love to hear your opinion on K.J. Parker. He's not consistently brilliant, but I always thought The Folding Knife or The Engineer trilogy ought to be right up your alley.

Tariq

Any good war poetry y’all would recommend (I can say y’all as a Texan imo)? As a creative writing undergraduate I as always told to read Bruce Weigl - I did and actually did enjoy his book What Saves Us - but never got much deeper than that.

Beloved Girl

I've always liked the opening passages of FMF's No More Parades, where the protagonist is trying to move a draft of 2,994 troops. There's that great comic moment when they come under fire and a Welsh conscript, 0 Nine Morgan, is killed. His Welsh compatriot from the same village is basically like, never mind, because the prize fighter that 0 Nine Morgan's wife had run off with was 100% going to murder 0 Nine Morgan on his upcoming leave home anyway.

radiowarnerd

Hi Peron, That's a great story! I read FMF's 'Big Novel' The Good Soldier and now wish I'd read this one instead. The Good Soldier turned out NOT TO BE ABOUT WAR AT ALL, just some dummy who couldn't figure out that everybody was lying to him. I'm sure that was an allegory for the gullible soldiers of WWI, but I didn't want an allegory, I wanted a war story!

radiowarnerd

The Iliad's pretty good. I hear there's a new version out that's not bad. Parts of The Tain are fun, mostly when people die in interesting ways. But the best of all is Archilochus, losing most of his poetry is one of the tragedies of history.

Animals in Motion

Jungers "Storm of steel" is much much better than the one Mark mentioned!

Ned S

The book versions of A Song of Ice and Fire are a great look at medieval war and politics.

Michael S. Judge

David Jones's mystic prose-poem of the Great War, IN PARENTHESIS, is sublime in the highest sense

James Evans

If anyone here does like the melancholy Tory posh boy Waugh war novels, would also recommend vol 7-9 of Anthony Powell’s infinitely long ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ (The Valley of Bones, The Soldier’s Art, and The Military Philosophers) which form another WW2 trilogy. Absolutely loved this episode btw, having just listened to it a few years late, and will read all the ones I haven’t.