The books appear in order of satisfaction and merit. Prices are from publishers’ lists and might vary depending on the seller.

NONFICTION

“War Flower: My Life After Iraq” by Brooke King, Potomac, 280 pages, $29.

Pfc. Brooke King is testifying at the court-martial of the Army captain who is the father of her unborn twins.

The court reminds her that she is “not permitted to look at the accused,” but with temerity and tenderness she looks. She mouths “I love you” to him, and that’s “the first time I had said it.”

“War Flower” is full of such frank emotion and explicit intimacy, the story of an Iraq veteran whose perspective is alternately chilling and charming. She bares all, starting with the cover image that is an enlargement of her wrist tattoo with hash marks a publicist says tally “her seven confirmed kills.”

She is a war flower, a soldier who has “miraculously survived” war without a physical injury. Emotionally she is a wilted and “war torn,” what the Veterans Affairs department describes as “PTSD and some brain damage.”

“I was the sum total of my suffering made out in the form of a body.”

Fortunately for readers, she finds a way to sum up her feelings, including unflattering ones. Her book is welcome not only because the voice is female — rare in combat memoirs — but also because her message is not exclusive to only one gender.

Not that she evades the topic of women in war. “You don’t want anyone to think you’re a pussy. You’re doing a man’s job (she’s a mechanic), so you suck it the f—- up” around any other soldier, male or female. Some soldier sisters maintain “a girl thing I could never understand: The kill-or-be-killed mentality that women in the military had for one another.”

The potential for being hurt and for hurting something or someone else pervades. A sergeant shoots camels for target practice. A jaded soldier devilishly fires his weapon at a boy on a sidewalk, forcing him into traffic. “I watch in horror from 15 feet away” as the kid’s head “is split open like a pistachio shell.”

She recognizes her own rigor. “Our survival is based on how violent one human can be toward another when given the bullets and the means with which to use them.” She can be violent, and she becomes a victim of her own violence.

“Nothing good survives war,” she writes. Except books such as this.

“Beyond the Call: Three Women on the Front Lines in Afghanistan” by Eileen Rivers, Da Capo, 288 pages, $27.

The author, an editor and an Army veteran, suggests that female engagement teams (FETs) are “the American military’s secret — and in many cases, most effective — weapon.” American women, she notes, have long been active in combat, starting with Deborah Sampson in 1782.

Her credible reporting supports her points. By 2010, “nearly 130 women had already died as a result of direct combat.” Yet “there are men who still deny that women can and do fulfill combat missions. That repudiation is like a punch in the gut.”

She gives her assumptions punch by concentrating the narrative on the personally fulfilling yet sometimes professionally frustrating experiences of two soldiers and a Marine.

It’s hurry up and wait for Maj. Maria Rodriguez, the officer “in charge of securing and transporting detainees” in Afghanistan. Army rules force her to “wait every morning for a male to make space for her on his convoy so she could get off base.”

When Capt. Johanna Smoke is made part of a Women in the Army (WITA) effort “so the Army could get a sense of how women fared under such conditions,” she wonders if the Army might simply have inquired about “how she fared after she returned from Iraq two years ago.”

Marine Sgt. Sheena Adams, whose image is on the cover, asks for an FET assignment in Afghanistan. But her “seven months in combat prevented her from putting time in on her regular job as a helicopter mechanic, and that made getting promoted difficult” — while “taking on a risky combat tour was usually a career boost for men.”

Still, they persist. Despite culture, history and habit. Even the author, presumably inadvertently, uses language that some find sexist. Women are “small” and “petite” when, if height is important to performance, measurements would be precise and meaningful. Are men ever “petite?” These are no small points in a book about the need for equality.

Rivers closes at Fort Bragg in 2015 when two female officers graduate from Ranger School, entering “a history-making club that only a few could understand.”

“The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder” by Sean McFate, William Morrow, 336 pages, $30.

People in charge of wars might not buy every idea the former mercenary sells but they ought to think about them. (It’s OK to use the mercenary word: “I was one.”)

Why? “Wars since 1945 have squandered American blood, wasted trillions of tax dollars, and damaged national honor, while resolving nothing on the ground,” says McFate, an Army veteran who teaches at National Defense and Georgetown universities.

“We do not know what war is, and if we do not understand it, we cannot win it.” To win, Western leaders must redefine esteemed theories. The rest of the world already has.

“Nothing is more unconventional today than conventional war.” Or put another way, as he does, “conventional war is dead.” Or, “conventional war has become a relic, like a pay phone.” He is determined to be clear.

Now the world has “shadow wars” between entities that are not official nations, replacing traditional war with what McFate calls “durable disorder.”

Disruption dominates, often deceptively. “When China wants to compel the U.S. to do something, it doesn’t turn to force. That’s junior varsity stuff. It messes with America’s pocketbook and turns to psychological warfare.”

China’s neighbor Russia is the “empire of lies,” and “when Russia wants to destabilize Europe . . . it bombs Syria,” which forces refugees into an economically exasperated Europe. Disruption accomplished.

“Shadow wars” use information as a weapon, and “the U.S. should be winning the battle of narrative — it’s the home of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.” One way is to “invest in people rather than in machines” (especially the F-35) while reinforcing strategic thinking. “Leaders need to learn to think strategically as cadets, not as colonels. It’s often too late by then.”

To the author, “War is more like jazz than engineering.” His book is an evocative opening number.

“Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die: How the Allies Won on D-Day” by Giles Milton, Picador, 424 pages, $30.

Everyone in the title is present and accounted for in this suspenseful account of the initial 24 hours of the Allies’ invasion of the French coast in 1944. Almost everyone. There’s no real gangster, no Al Capone, although a captured Briton looks like one, says Germany’s Field Marshall Rommel.

Published last year in Britain as the less-catchy “D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story,” the history feels immediate, like only yesterday. Soldiers, sailors, et.al., speak for themselves, “lads” who use “favourite” for “favorite” as they head “towards” — “toward” in American English — the tide at Normandy. Their voices, from archives, are similar to the narration and structure of the World War I documentary movie, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” now in theaters.

Rommel, Eisenhower and Hitler show up but the burden of the fight and the chronology is from the perspective of women and men in the blood bath at shore, in the cloudy air and on the wet ground.

Eva Eifler, “an unwilling German conscript” on duty in an 11th century abbey in Caen, opens the book as she listens to enemy messages. George Lane, a British commando, reaches France and is captured. James Rudder, a 34-year-old Texas football coach, must lead his battalion in scaling cliffs — if they reach shore.

The inauspicious launch “looked set to end as a massacre,” says Milton, whose father-in-law served in the Wehrmacht. “The first landings on Omaha Beach were an ongoing catastrophe.”

Although “every loss was a tragedy; every death a cause of grief,” the multinational troops display “uncommon daring” in Milton’s delectable style.

“Summoned at Midnight: A Story of Race and the Last Military Executions at Fort Leavenworth” by Richard A. Serrano, Beacon, 240 pages, $27.

He is 18 years old with “excellent” ratings and a brother who becomes a sergeant major, and “like any smart soldier, kept his head down” at Camp Roeder outside Salzburg, Austria, in 1954.

Pfc. John Bennett has epilepsy and is black, and he is accused of sexually assaulting a white, 11-year-old Austrian girl. Army jurors deliberate 23 minutes, and Bennett is sent to Fort Leavenworth.

Bennett’s legal plight, which spans from Eisenhower to Kennedy, represents a justice system that historically fails black men. His case is convincing, and a study shows that, in similar incidences today, black soldiers are “still twice as likely as whites to be disciplined and court-martialed.”

Serrano also offers a history of the Kansas “Castle” and its keepers from 1955 through 1961, when 17 inmates were on death row. Eight are white and nine are black. The white guys do not end up on the gallows.

The statistics are shameful. Bennett maintains that because he did not kill someone, he ought not be killed. He also sustains hope. Inside the prison yard he refines his baseball skills, and a guard calls him “the best submarine pitcher I’ve ever seen.”

Bennett wants to play on the prison team but “the squad was off limits to death row soldiers.”

“Code Name Lise: The True Story of the Spy Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Woman” by Larry Loftis, Gallery, 320 pages, $27.

Near the end of this wartime tale about a clandestine couple, you hope somebody will make a movie out of the thriller-like plot.

They did. In 1950, only eight years after French-born Odette Sansom left her three daughters in London in order to be a courier in France for British special operations.

Odette didn’t see herself as a spy, and she agrees to initial training only to prove “that she was not the right person for the job.” She is wrong and she’s off to Cannes, but not for the film festival. “Trains throughout France were a microcosm of espionage,” and almost every passenger is not whom he, or she, claims.

Odette falls in love with boss Peter Churchill — no relation to Winston, but don’t tell the Gestapo — and ends up in the same prison as he. Starvation, disease and torture follow, and Odette’s wit is staunch. Germans tell her she’ll die because she’s a British agent and a French woman.

“Gentlemen, you must make your pick of the counts. I can only die once.” She lives on in Loftis’ telling.

“The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America’s Forgotten Invasion of Russia” by James Carl Nelson, William Morrow, 320 pages, $29.

The Russians invaded the United States, but the Americans invaded Russia first. Northern Russia, “the top of the earth.”

“Russia tried to sway our 2016 elections,” says the author, “just as we almost unwittingly sought to interfere in the Russian Revolution one years ago.”

How’d that happen? Nelson’s thorough history of the 3rd Battalion, 339th Infantry Regiment, empathetically explains the unexpected, unusual duty station.

Getting there was half the horror. The transport ship sails above the Arctic Circle, but the soldiers’ winter wear is off limits — inexplicably secured in cargo holds. Also aboard is the worldwide epidemic of Spanish influenza. In Archangel, a soldier dies and “would never know” that his daughter’s mother in Michigan would succumb to the same “raging flu” months later.

Fighting sickness, cold and Bolsheviks, the American soldiers persevere in isolation and with apparent indifference from Washington.

On the morning of Armistice Day, at least three men die, “their blood oozing into the frozen, deep snow.” The Great War “was over, but not this ‘strange war’ in the Russian north. It had, in fact, hardly begun.” Eight months after November 11 the surviving Polar Bears heads home “with little understanding of why they were there.”

“Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em: The Rise and Fall of the Military Cigarette Ration” by Joel R. Bius, Naval Institute, 328 pages, $40.

Before World War I, cigarettes are considered “an effeminate vice” for “bad men and unruly boys” of the streets and not good form for “the cult of manhood” that prefers pipes and cigars in “gentlemen’s clubs.”

Then American men fight in battlefields that are “essentially an open grave” of sickening sights and smells. With nicotine rolled into an American tobacco blend that becomes a perfume and a pacifier, a soldier could enjoy a moment both stimulating and smoothing. In 1918 the Army orders “stocks of manufactured cigarettes to issue as standard daily rations.” MRE, as in Menthol or Regular?

Americans keep puffing in World War II. In 1944, the congressional Truman Committee says handing out cigarettes “is vital to the successful operation of our economy and the effective prosecution of the war” — not to mention government revenue, which Bius wittily calls a “tax addiction.”

Later in the all-volunteer force, subservient soldiers seeking distinction can “display their macho identity” with a cigarette, and the Marlboro Man becomes a model of masculinity. What is Madison Avenue’s role in keeping America and its military lit? Bius doesn’t go there.

The author, who teaches at the U.S. Air Force Command and Staff College, sticks with “the origins of the often comfortable yet increasingly controversial relationship among the military, the cigarette industry, and tobaccoland politicians.” His effort is mostly satisfying. Only the policy-and-politics section seems stale.

“Rising Son: A U.S. Soldier’s Secret and Heroic Role in World War II” by Sandra Vea, Sasquatch, 320 pages, $23.

Starting with a pun, the biographer employs “creative nonfiction” to fill the blanks in dramatizing the poignant story of her partner’s father, Masao Abe, who is drafted three months before Pearl Harbor.

Abe is “only one of 10 Japanese-American soldiers in the division, the 81st, a division with 25,000 soldiers” in 1944. The American-born soldier of Japanese descent overcomes discrimination — by his fellow Americans — and serves in a secret intelligence unit during South Pacific combat.

At times, he is a man without a country. During battle, a Japanese soldier tells Abe he doesn’t belong on the American side. “I don’t belong anywhere,” Abe replies, knowing that stateside his family members are interned in camps far from home. A fellow soldier asks him where he’ll go after the war. He has “no idea. If I make it out I’ll find a new home.”

He returns to his native land with medals, including the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. In 2010, he receives a Congressional Gold Medal, recognition for a man who was not permitted to join a veterans’ association immediately after his discharge.

“Topgun: An American Story” by Dan Pedersen, Hachette, 320 pages, $28.

Fifty years after he served as the first officer in charge of the new Navy Fighter Weapons School, and 33 years after the release of the 1986 movie “Top Gun,” the 83-year-old author tells “the deeper story beyond the Hollywood portrayal.”

Naval aviation “is an unforgiving calling. One error and people — including yourself — die.” But pilots find release. “Sometimes we’d check out a bird for a weekend to practice cross-country navigation.”

In 1967 in Vietnam he wants to be the “tip of the spear,” but remains “the thumb and forefinger of Lyndon Johnson’s gradual escalation of pressure.” That doesn’t work.

His 100-person air wing loses 13 men and 12 planes. “If we were going to regain the dominance that was naval aviation’s birthright, we would need to make changes.”

Enter Topgun, a school “to teach other pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky.” They become hot staff. In 1972, 60 percent of the MiGs “went down at the hands of Topgun grads” or crews they trained.

In 1983, Pedersen retires after 29 years. At home with his high-school sweetheart, the enlisted mechanic-turned-rear-admiral keeps looking up:

• He unfavorably assesses “the Pentagon’s fascination with stealth technology,” particularly the expensive F-35.
• “Sometimes while I lay beside the pool watching the jets and satellites ease by overhead, I use my imagination to design my ultimate fighter aircraft.” His memoir acknowledges two fellow writers. Evidently three is a charm.

“Bourbon & Bullets: True Stories of Whiskey, War, and Military Service” by John C. Tramazzo, Potomac, 288 pages, $30.

In a mix of military and mash, an officer and “whiskey enthusiast” reports that “until now, no writer has fully explored the depth of military service among the most notable American whiskey distillers and executives.”

The glass is now full. The Army lawyer’s approach to the bar is an enthusiastically concocted and meticulously researched, but ultimately dry, toast to the providers of “an alcoholic distillate from a fermented mash of grain.” By the time you get to the appendix, your appetite is whet for the recipes, including General Omar Bradley’s Old Fashioned, created when oranges were not available during World War II.

Tramazzo finds “veterans’ fingerprints upon the storied and complex history of our nation’s whiskey industry” and notes that the USS Arkansas hosted “happy hours” in 1914 – when “sailors could still lawfully drink alcohol onboard their ships.” More about that good ship might add a welcome twist to this, sober tale.

“Zero to Hero: From Bullied Kid to Warrior” by Allen J. Lynch with Richard Ernsberger Jr., Pritzker, 384 pages, $25.

With varnished jacket and heavy-stock paper, the slick autobiography by a Medal of Honor recipient tells about an admittedly unslick, blue-collar Midwestern boy who becomes a hero to a nation, if not himself.

“I wasn’t a great soldier but I was a competent one.”

Likewise, as a child he is “not the most popular kid in school, but I wasn’t unpopular either.” Then three bullies enter his fourth-grade class, and “what had been a happy period in my life turned dark.” He loses friends, motivation and self-worth. “Men don’t cry,” says Dad.

Joining the Army rekindles his sense of purpose. He drops from Officer Candidate School in favor of enlisted ranks, and he requests Vietnam duty. “Unless you change your attitude,” he is told, “you won’t last a week.” He does and saves lives in 1967 at Dak To.

Later, he realizes the war was “a geopolitical folly that wasted the lives of so many of my generation.” He is depressed, and he drinks. “I felt guilty that I had not been wounded in the battle.” Ten years after combat, while at National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, he realizes he must “live the life these men in the cemetery never had a chance to live.” “Zero” is the plain-spoken hero’s plain report.

“American Spirit: Profiles in Resilience, Courage, and Faith” by Taya Kyle and Jim DeFelice, William Morrow, 368 pages, $28.

DeFelice, who co-wrote “American Sniper” with Chris Kyle and “American Wife” with Kyle’s widow, Taya, teams again with Taya for another “American” title.

The collection — not to be confused with the cigarette brand — highlights good deeds by three dozen people: civilians and veterans, nobodies and somebodies, and their groups such as Heroes and Horses, and Operation Safe Haven. Each has “the best America has to offer: her American Spirit,” Kyle says, although “we may not see it on television or read about it on the Internet.” (Read a newspaper, your reviewer suggests.)

Evidently compensating for deficient news sources, the book, due in April, promotes the nonprofits. Each organization “represents the pebble that lands in the middle of the pond, generating ripples of help and hope outward.” In the swim is Chris Kyle Frog Foundation.

Emotional support rises to the surface. “If Life is a battle, love is worth fighting for,” Taya says. But you need not make a “huge gesture” or start a nonprofit to be helpful. “If you can be one person’s light any given day, you will have made a contribution.” And, presumably, spreading light is not exclusively an American endeavor.

“Death March Escape: The Remarkable Story of a Man Who Twice Escaped the Nazi Holocaust” by Jack J. Hersch, Frontline, 276 pages, $35

Hersch’s father, a Hungarian Jew, is not shy about telling his son about his escapes from the Nazis.

But when father’s image shows up on a concentration-camp memorial website, the author wonders who provided the photograph and why his father never told him about his returning to the prison site in 1997.

His guilt and quest turn up little reason for suspicion. But any narrative that sheds light on “the communists, socialists, intellectuals, politicians, resistance fighters, gays, gypsies, common criminals, prisoners of war and others deemed unfit to live under the Nazi flag” in dark times is worthwhile.

“The Airplane Graveyard: The Forgotten WWII Warbirds of Kwajalein Atoll” by Brandi Mueller with Alan Axelrod, Permuted Press, 176 pages, $30.

Not exactly “forgotten” — divers have known about the sunken planes for at least 50 years — but rarely seen.

Dumping was cheaper than transporting at the end of the war, and in 1945, 150 U.S. aircraft were “consigned to oblivion” until photographer Mueller, a Coast Guard-certified merchant mariner, plunges 120 feet beneath the sea in the Marshall Islands.

Her photographs capture your attention, as will, unfortunately, the amateur-quality editing. Mueller’s colorful images invite you to look closer at the machines. Duotones of ghostly, partially submerged planes are more intriguing. Often their scale is heightened by the presence of a diver — human, mammal — and by bottom-of-the-sea growth. You can imagine the planes’ taking off again after a dusting off by their young American pilots.

HELP YOURSELF

“The Warrior Code: 11 Principles to Unleash the Badass Inside of You” by Tee Marie Hanible with Denene Miller, St. Martin’s, 298 pages, $26.

Delete the grammatically needless “of” in the subtitle. Then delve into Hanible’s life.

By 17 she loses her father, is taken from her mother, “endured” foster care, is “kicked out of school, shot, piled into the back of several cop cars, handcuffed in a police interrogation room, awakened in a hospital bed after a drug-induced fainting spell, pregnant, and an active member of a dangerous gang” and ends up in a military reform school.

Those Chicago years would tantalize Dickens. They definitely make you wish the book or another biographer could tell more about Tee’s path from despondence into direction, from bleak house to barracks and 19 years in the military. Appetite whet, a reader wants details about the African-American woman’s challenges in a Marine Corps of men. Her two decades in uniform get short shrift.

The principles are hardly “badass” and interrupt the incredible story of the retired gunnery sergeant who overcomes youthful misdirection and indiscretion. Next to her demonstrated tenacity, the 11 guidelines — such as “get out of your own way” — seem superfluous.

“The Morning Mind: Use Your Brain to Master Your Day and Supercharge Your Life” by Dr. Rob Carter III and Dr. Kirti Salwe Carter, HarperCollins, 224 pages, $18.

Waking up is no longer hard to do.

Rob is an Army lieutenant colonel, and probably his morning reveilles one to emulate or to think about while you have a mocha latte instead. (Catherine Leonardo’s cover cleverly shows a cup of coffee’s steam forming an outline of a brain.)

Blending medicine, science and a wholistic sensibility, Rob (Ph.D.) and Kirti, his wife (M.D.), rise to the occasion. “Our objective is to master the morning and the rest of the day efficiently.”

In the morning, your body is taller and your brain is bigger after a night’s sleep, they say. To help you stay fresh, they offer tips that begin “the very second you wake.” First, drink a glass of water — because your body is dehydrated after hours of sleep. And because the book’s scientific style, though practical, can be dry.

“The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance” by Bill Treasurer and Captain John R. Havlik, USN (ret.), Little Leaps Press, 117 pages, $16.

This is not about the elected leader you might think it’s about.

The only politicians who make the authors’ dubious list are Al Franken, Eric Greitens — like Havlik, a former Navy SEAL — John Conyers and Robert Bentley. Army generals Wayne Grigsby and Joseph Harrington get a mention, and David Petraeus gets a whole page.

Havlik and Treasurer are graduates of West Virginia University (this reviewer’s alma mater) and offer to share their management skills via a consulting firm, also. Their assessments and reflections have the feel and zeal and exclamation points a speaker might bring to a workshop about how to avoid allowing arrogance — the “killer”— to be the death of your career and your character. The message: Hubris can lead you into detritus.

FICTION

“Down Along the Piney: Ozarks Stories” by John Mort, Notre Dame, 212 pages, $20.

You start with mild expectations. The book is from a university press rather than a big publisher. The title seems appropriate for a collection of folksy tales about folksy folks who live along picturesque Big Piney Creek in Arkansas.

Wrong. Welcome to the down and out who populate the Piney Valley of meth and mistakes.

The 13 stories about veterans (the author is an Army veteran of Vietnam) and civilians received the 2018 Sullivan Prize for short fiction, and within minutes after finishing them, this reviewer ordered a copy of Mort’s first novel, 1999’s “Soldier in Paradise,” another award recipient.

The longest story is about Birdy, the “best marksman” in New Jerusalem, a colony founded by Top, a Vietnam and Bosnia veteran whose “Army never lost a battle.” Another resident knew Timothy McVeigh at Fort Riley and says the terrorist was a “fool” with good intentions.

That’s music to Rambo-worshipping Birdy, who wants to make the world safe for demagoguery. Eventually he learns that “if you meant to do a right thing but did a wrong thing, nothing right remained.” In only 49 pages Mort successfully tackles religion, race, politics, government and drugs.

Birdy is not the only soul roiling on the river. An ex-prisoner learns that her friends might have read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” too closely. In another story, Carrie has an “oversized body” and wants to be loved but, like her mongrel dog, “she could have turned to the moon and howled in pain.”

A disturbed and disengaged veteran finally gets VA benefits that another patient terms “money for nothing.” And a preacher learns that comfort is hard to convey. “Sometimes men bear such awful burdens that nothing you can say is adequate.” However, Mort’s sensibility is more than adequate.

“Dog Watches: Stories from the Sea” by Rolf Yngve, Saddle Road, 202 pages, $20.

Like the previous book, this is from a small publisher — in Hawaii, not regarded as a publishing center. Seven of the 11 seaworthy stories by a retired Navy captain were previously published in literary reviews, and the others ought to have been. Each has substance and merit.

Like the previous review’s author, Yngve has a delicate but deliberate voice. He tells tales of sailors who, like their ships, often pass in the night. Really. In the opener, Jim Ehrlich, a retired officer stuck on a Pacific bridge — because of potential suicide jumper is blocking traffic — shows up in two other stories. In one, he is the commander of a ship that also appears again. Olivia Luce is a lieutenant and pilot in one suspenseful story and at a higher rank in two others.

There’s a sailor in every portrayal, and each watch requires a decision — personal or professional or both. Throughout there’s an undercurrent of longing, of wanting or not wanting to know “what if.” In “Billy,” two sailors are in a fragile marriage, and the husband learns “how it feels when someone shows up to ask a question you never want asked.”

In “The Hour of Letdown,” a “delicate” lieutenant rests her arm on a captain’s hand, and her XO’s thoughts transport her uncomfortably to the past.

“Imagine never once in your life feeling pretty,” she thinks. “She had never once been cute, or girly, or ever expected to feel that way.” Yngve’s sensitivity invites you to feel for each character.

“And the Whole Mountain Burned: A War Novel” by Ray McPadden, Center Street, 288 pages, $26.

Menace lands on the opening page when “a fly fresh off the dead” alights Ranger Nick Burch’s knee during a lull in fighting. The moment instantly establishes the feel of the story by a Ranger veteran of Afghanistan.

Six years after his first “grand,” violent fight, Sergeant Burch is back in the Hindu Kush. Private Danny Shane comes to the “crumbling schist” of Camp Holiday for “the adventure he had been waiting for.” Rubies are in the rough. Monkeys and bunnies are targets.

Danny gets his fun, and Sergeant Burch gives tough love. “I’m messing with you” is his excuse to his guys. Always a warrior, he bites the hand of a “muj” fighter and “never spit out the thumb.”

Being mean is a carat standard. A soldier buys souls lucratively for $25. Others bully other soldiers, interpreters and locals — they call one Sadboy, another Dimchild.

The newbie Shane, whom Burch says lacks “hate in your heart,” soon acquires animosity. Inside a house that has “a goddam walnut dresser” he realizes the home is “far nicer than the Mississippi trailer” he grew up in. “The idea of luxury in the Kush really messed up his well-ordered world.”

The new world order is chaotic, which the debut novelist evokes craftily. Thinking about revenge, Shane jokes about sending mujahideen fighters “to a nice flat place in the States and have them duke it out with the locals. Make them stay 15 months.” Burch likes the idea. “The muj would go nuts in a week,” compared to the soldiers’ own 433-day tour.

During the final mission “a shiver ran through Shane. It was just him and Burch chasing the muj through trees.” Should he step back from wrong into right and let his sociopathic mentor forge alone? Shane curses “his damn loyalty.” Justifiably, given the ominous plot.

The grandiose, apocalyptic finale illuminates hearts of darkness and, for some, might make a more effective ending than the epilogue. The book is an achievement that can be read as metaphor or mystery. Go for both.

“Sea Hunt, a Novel in the World of Shake Davis, USMC” by Dale Dye, Warriors, 226 pages, $15.

Davis is the protagonist in the series of novels by Dye, a Marine veteran of Vietnam. In “Sea Hunt” — not to be confused with the mid-20th century television series of the same title — Shake’s daughter is the hero.

She is a Woods Hole, Massachusetts, oceanographer who is also a Navy Reserve lieutenant (j.g.), temporarily assigned to lead an office at a Florida base. She encounters sailors who are diverse in age, race, gender and orientation but united in service.

Tracey attracts treachery such as an officer’s relationship with an enlisted sailor, sex-and-drug-trafficking, and a killer White Tip shark who is hungry for flesh, including hers: “If it ain’t killer sharks it’s killer criminals.” How Dye navigates all this is worth going aboard for.

This year, your Military Times reviewer offered readers reviews of 57 military-related titles and considered dozens of others. “Considered” means we read portions of other books in order to determine whether a review would serve readers. Those books often are “noted but not reviewed.”

Here are the 10 best volumes: Three in fiction and seven in nonfiction.

Fiction

Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman, Knopf, 192 pages, $23

His first novel, “Green on Blue,” made Military Times’ best books list in 2015. His second, “Dark at the Crossing,” was a finalist for the National Book Award and is on the Times’ 2017 list. His third novel makes the list also.

The Marine sets the barren garden of “Eden” mostly at Camp Lejeune and in a burn hospital.

After a blast in Hamrin Valley, Eden Malcom lies in a bed, cut “off up to the torso,” skin “tight and crumbled” from burns, “the most wounded man from both the wars.”

His wife is “forced to give up their best days,” and the otherworldly narrator — also a Marine — unfolds surprises about the trio’s relationships.

The point touches the ethereal, as does “Dark” — in which a character imagines “the seeds in the girls’ pocket growing shoots that would swaddle them beneath the earth.”

Everyone waits for Eden to go on or not, and you decide whether the plight symbolizes wars that never end.

“Eden” is small in form but big in impact.

Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin, Random House, 192 pages, $27

The short book of short stories launches the 23-year Navy veteran into the pantheon-in-progress of literary fiction coming out of today’s wars.

Two of the 11 pieces appeared first in The New Yorker — an indication of their high quality.

All take place in the dystopia of hardworking, dirty dogs of war, and all are set where “the reigning world champions of speed and violence” train in Utah and North Carolina or fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The real setting is in the crevices of both mountains and warriors’ brains, which means that if you require easy resolution in your reading, you might be more comfortable with a thriller.

Challenge yourself. Go along with the canine in the title, a Belgian Malinois whose memorial service occurs in the dark, when night vision allows seeing “ice crystals trailing off the drone’s wingtips.”

Join the SEAL who fears water in a current where the Virgin Mary appears “in a whirlpool of diamonium phosphate, spinning on the surface.”

See what an operator sees, a “seahorse tails spinning clockwise” in a buddy’s eyes.

Finding Sgt. Kent by Raymond Hutson, Koehlerbooks, 208 pages, $16

The author, a doctor with an MFA in creative writing, “never went to war.” But he “spent 10 years or so caring for veterans of half a dozen wars, in VA hospitals.”

Evidently, he listens well, and he hears authentic voices.

His first novel is a well-constructed portrayal of sniper Army Master Sgt. Robert Kent’s return home after almost two decades’ service, which includes three tours in Afghanistan, two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.

“Kent is no longer the master of his world,” which now includes civilians.

“It’s weird. In the Army everybody’s on the same side,” Kent says. “Here, everybody’s for themselves,” and he thinks everyone is afraid of him.

He travels with a goal to find the remnants of his family. His father never returned from Vietnam and his mother died when he was 15. The tour brings danger and pain — and a reunion with a fellow soldier.

“Maybe we can protect each other,” she says. “But you’re going to have to forgive yourself.”

Nonfiction

Eat the Apple: A Memoir by Matt Young, Bloomsbury, 251 pages, $26

This Recruit and You and I and We, in alternating voices, go from Marine boot camp to war and back, and from 18-year-old boy to Young man.

Sounds familiar, but this is a fresh, imaginative revelation about becoming and being a fighter.

“We become grunts … meat for the grinder,” says the veteran of three Iraq deployments.

The tone is darkly comedic and is told in short chapters.

Young learns that “an improperly looped belt shows a lack of attention to detail, which will result in this person causing the deaths of Marines in combat.”

And if he repeats a task such as looping a belt, “it will become automatic, ingrained in the muscle forever.”

The book is a disruptive, and Young spares no one, including his own active duty full of sweat and sweating. Alcohol and drinking. Masturbation. Self-contempt. Brotherhood and estrangement — and their companions, guilt and indifference.

All the above makes men into Marines who opt to eat the fruit and [expletive deleted] the Corps.

The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq by C.J. Chivers, Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $28

In “The Gun” (2010), Chivers reassembles the AK-47. In his second book, The New York Times journalist spans 17 years with stories from six fighters’ active duty.

Chivers, a Marine captain during the Persian Gulf War, “covers these combatants with a simple organizing idea: that they are human.”

Nevertheless, anyone trying to understand why the Pentagon manages “again and again, to make war look like a bad idea” should read closely.

Among the fighters is Navy Hospital Corpsman Dustin E. Kirby, who learns in 2004 that his cousin Joe Dan Worley, also a corpsman, loses a leg in an explosion outside Fallujah. In Karma later, Kirby is shot in the face.

After surgeries, Kirby and his mother meet former President George W. Bush in 2013, and mom becomes the fighter.

“I’m not the same mom who sent her son to Iraq,” she tells Bush.

“I am sorry,” he replies. “I am responsible, I know. I sent him there.”

Touching the Dragon: And Other Techniques for Surviving Life’s Wars by James Hatch and Christian D’Andrea, Knopf, 336 pages, $29

When you think you cannot bear to read another memoir by another SEAL, an irresistible one surfaces. The former senior chief and dog handler thinks “rah-rah books about the Navy’s Action Man crews sometimes cheat the reader of something: The dark places, the brokenness.”

He dives into darkness, anecdotally and antidotally. He decries “the video-game-ification of war,” and he and his coauthor take you on the special operations “Speeding Train” until he is injured.

He languishes in a “coffin of condemnation” that is part of his “regimen of feeling sorry for myself” until he confronts what he calls truth.

With therapy, he “keeps at bay” the dragon of discontent, and he discovers that trauma is universal.

“Life is combat. For most of us.”

Fight Like a Girl: The Truth Behind How Female Marines Are Trained by Kate Germano with Kelly Kennedy, Prometheus, 288 pages, $18

This memoir is on the list for its blunt take on women in your Marine Corps.

The former lieutenant colonel indicts her Corps’ reluctance to make all recruits meet similar standards.

Why the disparity? Because her commanders want “women to serve only in support roles.”

As commander of female training at Parris Island, “I was showing that [women] could” meet Corps expectations in “marksmanship, physical fitness, and leadership.”

Meanwhile, the Corps “put together a study to show that they could not. This is why I was fired” in 2015.

Germano and coauthor Kennedy (an Army veteran and former Military Times staffer) say 32,000 male recruits are trained annually compared to 3,200 females, and that’s a shame.

“It is staggering to consider how much talent the Marine Corps misses out on each year.”

Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the 50-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic, Simon and Schuster, 544 pages, $28

This history of the sinking in World War II takes a wide berth at launch, describing the USS Indianapolis as a ship “born from soil as American as the men who sailed her.”

Overlook the grandiosity and instead dwell on the sad but infuriating story.

Men — boys as young as 17 — drift five nights while enduring attacks by sharks and each other.

Of the 1,196 souls aboard ship, “three of every four men” die.

There are details about top-secret cargo — uranium for the Enola Gay — and about cowardly admirals “blaming each other in secret” while the captain is court-martialed in public.

The Navy withholds news about the July attack by Japanese torpedoes until VJ Day, when “the joyous news of the Japanese surrender would render the Indianapolis disaster a comparative footnote.”

Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila by James M. Scott, Norton, 640 pages, $33

This is not a dry recounting of two opposing generals’ military tactics during World War II.

Despite the vague title, the narrative is engrossing — although the subject matter is occasionally repellent.

What “Indianapolis” does for sailors, “Rampage” does for the people of Manila — until its devastation in 1945. Both books emphasize the Pacific war’s devastation to individuals. The Navy faces starvation, salt water and sharks (in the branch itself and in the sea), and the Manilans face the Japanese.

“The enemy went berserk in the face of defeat,” says a witness, but “berserk” seems benign when “the retreating Japanese had left a trail of massacres for the Americans to follow, like macabre breadcrumbs.”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur preens while Manila burns. Eager to make his “I shall return” remark come true, MacArthur declares victory early when “The Battle of Manila, in fact, had not even truly begun.”

Machete Squad by Brent Dulak, Kevin Knodell and David Axe with illustrations by Per Darwin Berg, Dead Reckoning, 160 pages, $19

The cover image looks like Freddy Kreuger’s cousin and conveys the wrong message.

Inside, Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Dulak sensitively relives his experiences as a sergeant in charge of a medical unit that ties off amputations — “machete medicine” — as a routine duty.

Relying on minimal text and a talented illustrator to fill in the cerebral blanks, this memoir in graphic form is a peek into the mind of the young soldier with doubts before he deploys to Afghanistan in 2012.

The austere settings are vast in scale yet feel intimate, as though you are seeing the world from Dulak’s eyes.

Berg’s drawings use color and depth to convey desolation that looks destructive and mountains that look mysterious.

The visual form is not your traditional book from Naval Institute Press but is a welcome one.

Bonus: These books are also worth your attention

Steve Coll’s Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan documents the miscommunications between the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and the White House under two administrations.

Michael Beschloss’ Presidents of War profiles nine presidents, one of whom opts out of battle. Eight is enough, and they take “the American people into major wars roughly once in every generation.” All the “Presidents” words are worth heeding.

Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, a National Book Award nonfiction winner, is a cautionary read for service members trying to make sense of what President Putin’s policies perpetrate.

Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump eloquently demonstrates how a nation’s discourse reflects “the commander in chief’s erratic, impulsive decision-making style based not on knowledge but on instinct.”

Nico Walker’s Cherry indicates that the former Army medic is a writer with potential. In this uneven debut novel, a veteran’s days and nights are full of drugs and sex – and robbing banks. His story is one of 100 “notable” books of the year, says The New York Times.

Plus: The most memorable line of the year

In Marine veteran Matthew Betley’s third thriller, “Field of Valor,” a TV station’s helicopter hovers to cover breaking news – an attack on a highway outside Washington, D.C. On the ground a Secret Service agent discovers that the aircraft actually contains bad guys in journalists’ clothing.

“It’s a fake news helicopter,” he realizes.

An historian depicts nearly unreadable crimes by Japanese troops in Manila. An Army veteran writes a memoir — before he drops out of a political race. And an Iraq-and-Afghanistan soldier’s memoir relies on illustrations.

Here is Military Times’ fall roundup of book reviews, listed in order of reading value and satisfaction. Prices are provided by the publishers.

Click here for our fall military fiction reviews.

The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq by C.J. Chivers, Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $28.

In “The Gun” (2010), Chivers reassembles the AK-47 by focusing on the weapon’s predecessors and makers, making the narrative less mechanical and more human. If guns don’t kill people, inventors do. In his second book, The New York Times journalist spans 17 years with stories from six fighters’ active duty, reporting on people and not the policy.

If wars don’t kill people, “operationally incoherent” commands do.

Chivers, who was a Marine captain during the Persian Gulf War, “covers these combatants with a simple organizing idea: that they are human” — and in this report, they are only male.

Nevertheless, this is a must-read for anyone trying to understand how, where and why we fight, when “across three presidential administrations” the Pentagon manages “again and again, to make war look like a bad idea.”

Chivers’ good idea results in exceptional storytelling, a mix of contemporary history and journalistic drama.

“War can drive the wounded to all manner of conclusions,” and half dozen fighters tell theirs.

Among them, Army Sgt. 1st Class Leo Kryszewski, who, after “18 years in the Army, he survives his first gunfight.” A year later, shrapnel penetrates “his back, his buttocks, and his face.” Alone in the hospital, he hates “being away from a team.”

And Marine 1st Lt. Jarrod Neff, who hears he will “participate in the largest Marine helicopter assault since Vietnam” at a place with “an imposing aura. Marjah, the briefings said, was an impregnable no-go zone,” and its “fall would augur a turning point in the war and fill new chapters in Marine Corps lore.”

Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss, Crown, 752 pages, $35.

Only one of Beschloss’ nine presidents opts out of war, but eight is enough for the historian.

They take “the American people into major wars roughly once in every generation,” he notes, and his ninth book delineates “important qualities of leadership that Americans should demand when they choose a candidate for that office.”

Read this before you vote in 2020.

The book succeeds despite length (148 pages of notes) and heft. At two and a half pounds, the book is still half a pound lighter than last fall’s massive “Grant” by Ron Chernow – and, fortunately, has fewer adjectives. The only bad thing about this captivating study is that you want to know more about current predicaments. As is, the book should be on enlisted and officer reading lists.

With delectable details, Beschloss reports with a scholar’s training and a writer’s style about personalities, policies and politics in back rooms rather than battlefronts.

He starts with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and works his way up to Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush.

However, Beschloss only mentions Bush, a seeming and disappointing omission.

Why just a touch of Bush, Afghanistan, and Iraq? History and Beschloss need more time, and he writes only with “much historical hindsight and access to primary sources.”

May “Presidents at War, Part 2” be next.

Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila by James M. Scott, Norton, 640 pages, $33.

This is not just another recounting of two opposing generals’ military tactics during World War II. Despite the vague (“rampage”?) and stuffy title, the narrative is engrossing — although the subject matter is occasionally repellant.

What this summer’s bestselling “Indianapolis” (reviewed in Military Times in June) does for the ship’s sailors, “Rampage” does for the people in the city known as the Pearl of the Orient — until its devastation in 1945. Both books emphasize the Pacific war’s devastation to individuals. The Navy faces starvation, salt water and sharks (in the branch itself and in the sea), and the Manilans face the Japanese.

“The enemy went berserk in the face of defeat,” says a witness, but “berserk” seems benign when “the retreating Japanese had left a trail of massacres for the Americans to follow, like macabre breadcrumbs. Often lured by the rancid smell of the dead … troops cautiously entered the ruins … to discover hundreds of men, women, and children, slain by gunfire, bayonets and swords.”

Scott gives civilians the recognition they deserve, the generals get their dessert. Tomoyuki Yamashita, who knows the end is near, “initially mistook the American convoys for a much-needed resupply for his own forces.

‘We expected rice,’ his chief of staff said. ‘We got the American Army instead’.”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur preens while Manila burns. For one thing, his team doesn’t meet his standards.

“I don’t see how,” he says, “I have gotten as far as I have with the staff I have been surrounded with.”

Eager to make his “I shall return” remark come true and to find “his wardrobe of 218 silk and linen handkerchiefs,” he left in Manila in 1942, and MacArthur declares victory early — “in stark contrast to actual events on the ground. … The Battle of Manila, in fact, had not even truly begun.”

Nor will the “gruesome” battle ever end — for survivors and, now, for readers.

“It’s difficult to comprehend or even believe humans are capable of such barbarity,” says Scott, whose research is proof and whose narrative is enthralling.

We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change by Roy Scranton, SoHo, 360 pages, $17.

If war doesn’t get you, the climate will. So, what’s a reader to do?

You broke it. Fix it. Scranton, the Army veteran whose two previous books (one is the provocatively titled “War Porn” novel) are on Military Times’ “best” lists of 2015 and 2017, provides no easy repair guide.

“I’m a novelist and sometime journalist and an essayist,” he explains. “What can mere words do for a doomed civilization?”

But what good is thinking alone in your room, to paraphrase a line from “Cabaret.” Come fear the hubris’ sway — as you read all about it.

His conviction and consternation about ecology and society might propel you to act. It is “reasonable to say that the challenge we live with today is the greatest the human species has ever faced.”

And his verbal skill can expand your vocabulary. When do you use “ouroborosian” in a sentence?

The 11 essays (from 2010 – 2017) expand on his eloquent “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization,” the 2015 “best” title. The essays specifically about Iraq, “Back to Baghdad” and “The Trauma Hero,” are especially meaningful.

“To be honest, those brutal, maddening days in Baghdad in the summer of 2003, when I thought every morning I was going to die, were some of the sweetest and purest of my life. Each moment gleamed with transcendent splendor.”

Outside the Wire: 10 Lessons I’ve Learned in Everyday Courage by Jason Kander, Twelve, 256 pages, $28.

Publicity materials note the author’s “star” quality in politics, and in July — three weeks before publication of this book — he announced his candidacy for Kansas City mayor. But in early October, he opted out of the race, citing his need to take time off “after 11 years of trying to outrun depression and PTSD.”

In the book, he offers no bravado about his four-month deployment in Afghanistan. If readers want “a bunch of war stories, then you’ll be disappointed,” he writes. “I knew a ton of people in the Army who did more than me,” and he acknowledges “survivor’s guilt.”

Given the genial mood of his memoir-manifesto, he probably could easily make a living as a TV host or standup comedian if he ever gives up on politics. Did he inherit his performance ease from his great-uncle John, the composer of “Chicago” and “Cabaret”?

With candor, Kander goes from Kansas City to Kabul to Officer Candidate School instructor to courting voters, sometimes all in the same chapter. Each presents life lessons — “hustle and be humble” and “be willing to fail … publicly.”

He employs frequent footnotes as asides, including a standing joke about “Citizen Kane,” the 1941 movie. He makes his successes seem ordinary — including his founding Let America Vote — and “proudly” notes his “F” rating from the NRA.

“I’m not one who feels ‘political correctness run amok’ is an actual problem in America. I see nothing wrong with all of us trying to be decent to one another,” he writes.

City of Death: Humanitarian Warriors in the Battle of Mosul by Ephraim Mattos with Scott McEwen, Center Street, 304 pages, $25.

Another memoir by another SEAL?

Not really.

“I do not consider myself a hero, nor am I seeking recognition for my time as a SEAL,” Mattos clarifies at the start of the book written with McEwen, a co-writer of “American Sniper.”

Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian home, Ephraim (his brother’s name is Zebulun) wants to join the military, which is not a favored choice.

“We don’t need more Navy SEALs in the world,” the preacher exclaims in the school chapel. “We need more preachers!”

Mattos becomes both — and perhaps unknowingly follows the adage that the best preachers are the silent ones. After the Navy, he volunteers with the Free Burma Rangers, humanitarians headed by former Army special-forces officer David Eubank, in order to “use my military skills and experience to help others.”

Two and a half years “since I’d fired a weapon in battle,” he is “an armed civilian in an ambulance on the Nineveh Plains.” Inside a “bullet-riddled house in West Mosul,” his fellow Rangers include Burmese guerrilla medics, Texas missionaries, a retired Marine and his wife from Georgia, a British filmmaker, U.S. Mennonites and a French journalist.

“The absurdity was never lost on any of us.”

Nor is their purpose, which is to provide medical aid and to document abuses.

“We will not be led by fear or comfort,” Eubank says, “and we will always stand with the people who everyone else has written off.”

Charlie Company’s Journey Home: The Boys of ’67 and the War They Left Behind by Andrew Wiest, Osprey, 400 pages, $28.

On the jacket there’s another title line, one that narrows the subject: “The Forgotten Impact of Vietnam on the Wives and the Families of Veterans.” That’s the reason for this follow-up to the Vietnam War historian’s “The Boys of ’67,” the 2012 book that became National Geographic’s 2014 documentary, “Brothers in War.”

At a 2014 wake for one of the men — “Charlie Company was almost entirely made up of draftees” — widow Nancy Benedick tells the author that “nobody has ever told our story.”

Her statement is a revelation to him: “The Vietnam War was the unrelenting force that had crafted the landscapes of these women’s adult lives.”

Their reminiscences unfold, along with Wiest’s perspectives, in an oral-history style.

“When I spoke to these women, they had been alone for so long and their experiences had been invisible for so long, that they were sure they didn’t have a story to tell.”

They do. Collecting their and their husbands’ voices is commendable.

Ghost Riders: When U.S. and German Soldiers Fought Together to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II by Mark Felton, Da Capo, 320 pages, $27.

The “world’s most famous horse training academy” is “considered one of the preeminent symbols of Austria,” a cultural icon in a city whose Nazi head sends 65,000 Viennese Jews to concentration camps as “a contribution to European culture.”

But after six years of war, millions of Europeans are dead. German cities are practically destroyed. And hidden in a Czechoslovakian village are 219 of the Spanish Riding School’s Lipizzaner mares — “several still in foal” — and 400 other horses Aryans considered purely bred. (“Spanish” is in the name because of the breed’s origins.)

But the Soviet Red Army is approaching the stables that will be theirs at war’s end, and an Austrian in the German Army believes the stallions will be horsemeat for starving Russian troops. He persuades Americans to bring the horses to safety to what will be behind American lines — 18 miles away.

The U.S. soldiers, commanded by Virginia equestrian Col. Charles Reed in 1945, are “light on men, light on intelligence regarding route and enemy strengths and intentions, and . . . light on armor and firepower. ”

Poles, friendly Germans, Austrians and Cossacks join the ride, constituting “one of only two occasions during the Second World War when American and German soldiers fought side-by-side.”

Their journey makes you want to watch “Miracle of the White Stallions,” the movie released only 18 years after the event. Reed has a role.

Operation Columba – The Secret Pigeon Service: The Untold Story of World War II Resistance in Europe by Gordon Corera, Morrow, 336 pages, $29.

It’s easy to regard this history as one for the birds, but Corera assures otherwise.

“Pigeons did not win the war,” he writes. “People did.”

Volunteers, including sports birders, did much of the groundwork.

The plan by British agents to rely on clandestine messages that are pigeon-towed has successes, as does the BBC correspondent’s tale. In three years, 16,554 pigeons are “dropped in an arc from Copenhagen in Denmark to Bordeaux in the south of France.”

The idea takes flight in North America also. At its peak, the U.S. pigeon corps has 3,000 men, 150 officers and 54,000 pigeons.

Dreams of My Comrades: The Story of MM1C Murray Jacobs by Scott Zuckerman, M.D., Sunbury, 298 pages, $20.

The story of one Seabee’s experiences before, during and after World War II could benefit from polished packaging and sharper editing, but it is a fascinating study of how war can warp a mind.

A pediatrician convinces a 98-year-old Navy veteran in Utah to describe his being part of the “greatest” generation. Jacobs — not his real name — suffers from post-traumatic stress, and, in interviews, evidently verbatim here, he admits committing atrocities. Zuckerman determines the details do not match official reports.

The doctor-author’s sympathetic intention turns into savvy skepticism, challenging him to determine whether the sailor is telling the truth. In the process, readers will recall William Faulkner’s saying that “memory believes before knowing remembers,” and Jacobs’ pain sadly proves the point.

After Combat: True War Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan by Marian Eide and Michael Gibler, Potomac, 280 pages, $30.

An Army veteran and an English professor spend four years allowing “some 30” veterans to talk between 45 minutes and two hours about their experiences. In the process, the pair sees the “import of anonymity,” the value of allowing the men and five women to speak “with the promise of confidentiality.”

The anonymity might help an interviewee but not a reader’s comprehension or appetite. Consider the collection of voices a help-yourself chow line. The book “is not necessarily designed to be read in an orderly fashion.”

But structure is not the issue. There are no subject headers on individual recollections, and the stories provide little context. If the speaker mentions no location, you decide whether he or she is in Mosul or Kabul — or whether location matters — no matter the segment’s length. Lengthier ones would be more readable with simple fixes such as more paragraph indents. For added meaning and credibility, each can use a garnish of context from the editors’ plates.

The Philosophy of War Films edited by David LaRocca, Kentucky, 538 pages, $30.

Moviegoers who want to find meaning in their motion pictures — reverently called “films” in this collection — might enjoy surfing through the 15 scholarly essays.

“War films are at once artifacts that embody the struggle to account for war and a reflection of the ongoing effort to create stories about admittedly convoluted phenomena,” the editor says.

Most of the movies are familiar, including Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” Paul Haggis’ lesser-known “In the Valley of Elah” gets due respect, as does Charlie Chaplin’s “Shoulder Arms” — 100 years after its release.

When the Killer Man Comes: Eliminating Terrorists as a Special Operations Sniper by Paul Martinez with George Galdorisi, St. Martin’s, 304 pages, $27.

A retired staff sergeant and co-writer take you “to the hell that was Afghanistan in 2011” in a combat memoir from the view of a sniper, a topic some publishers can’t get enough of. This sniper loves “the exhilarating duty to watch over these bloody-handed heroes,” his fellow Rangers.

“One of the things that attracted me to become a Ranger sniper was that our craft is part science and part art.”

In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Bradley J. Birzer, Regnery, 175 pages, $27.

The defense rests quickly in this “biographical essay” about the nation’s seventh commander in chief.

“Forced to rank the U.S. presidents in terms of character, honesty, and effectiveness (regardless of political positions),” the Hillsdale College professor ranks him “number four, after Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan, respectively.”

Jackson “is famous, or notorious” for “fighting and displacing Indians from the American frontier,” but he “was not the Indian hater of leftist myth.” He “was in no way a racist,” although Birzer admits Jackson believed “Indian civilization lagged behind” — a belief you could call racism.

“If Jackson has become unfashionable, it is not because we have outgrown his virtues, but because we have need of them,” and he cites the current president’s praising of Old Hickory for acting “with courage, with grit, and with patriotic heart. And, by the way,” continues President Trump, “he was one of our great presidents.”

Want more? These books are noted but not reviewed.

African American Officers in Liberia: A Pestiferous Rotation, 1910-1942 by Brian G. Shellum, Potomac, 306 pages, $22

A retired Army officer looks at “a monumental piece of missing American history”: Why 17 black officers were “instruments of imperialism” while training forces in West Africa. How’d it go? “Pestiferous” is a clue.

Valley Forge by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $30.

This story of “an underdog United States toppling an empire” notes George Washington’s political prowess in fighting both the British and the critics in Congress.

War Animals: The Unsung Heroes of World War II by Robin Hutton, Regnery, 466 pages, $30.

With the release of this “heart-warming” history, the “dogs, horses, mules, pigeons — and even one cat” who served in the fight against Germany and Japan are no longer unsung.

Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On by Leigh Neville, Osprey, 352 pages, $30.

The Australian military writer carefully revisits and documents what happens in Somalia October 1993 and, in an appendix, what happens in the 2001 movie that didn’t really happen in real life.

A Fierce Glory: Antietam — the Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery by Justin Martin, Da Capo, 336 pages, $28.

The biographer of Frederick Olmsted, Walt Whitman and Alan Greenspan turns to Sept. 17, 1862, and the fight beside a creek near Sharpsburg, Md., where 3,654 soldiers die on “America’s bloodiest day.”

Fallout: Conspiracy, Cover-Up and the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Peter Watson, PublicAffairs, 432 pages, $28.

The journalist and historian says “a series of lies, pretenses and deceptions between the Allies resulted in the most dangerous killing machine in history.”

The Escape Artists: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War by Neal Bascomb, Houghton, 336 pages, $28.

British prisoners want to break out of Holzminden, “a land-locked Alcatraz” run by a German commandant who doesn’t want anybody to leave the place alive. At the end of the book is a list of escapees — and the “recaptured.”

Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion by Edward G. Lengel, Da Capo, 368 pages, $28.

Devastation and survival in the Argonne forest in World War I . The focus is on three soldiers (Maj. Charles Whittlesey, Capt. George McMurtry and Sgt. Alvin York) and a journalist (Damon Runyan).

Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam by Robert K. Brigham, Public Affairs, 320 pages, $28.

“Personal political rivalries and strategic confusion” drive the secretary of state. Based on “recently released material” from the Nixon Presidential Library, Kissinger’s papers at Yale, and archives in Ho Chi Minh City.

The Returned: They Left to Wage Jihad, Now They’re Back by David Thomson, translated by Gregory Flanders, Polity, 240 pages, $20.

The French journalist interviews men and women who went to Syria to join jihadist groups, and he analyzes the “social, religious, political, familial and psychological factors that push people to violent extremism.”

Operation Kinetic: Stabilizing Kosovo by Sean M. Mahoney, Potomac, 512 pages, $39.

The Royal Military College of Canada historian and author of books about Afghanistan and nuclear weapons turns to NATO’s Kosovo Force to “provide a blueprint for stabilizing operations around the world.”

Sword and Scimitar: 14 Centuries of War Between Islam and the West by Raymond Ibrahim, Da Capo, 352 pages, $28.

The most recent of the eight battles in this survey occurs in 1683. The current war between the religious states, including the Islamic State one, is nothing new, and the West ought to remember that.

Tin Can Titans: The Heroic Men and Ships of World War II’s Most Decorated Navy Destroyer Squadron by John Wukovits, Da Capo, 352 pages, $19.

The 2017 book is the recipient of the year’s Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature.

Here is Military Times’ fall roundup of fiction and graphic story reviews. Prices are provided by the publishers.

Click here for our fall military nonfiction reviews.

Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman, Knopf, 192 pages, $23.

His first novel, “Green on Blue,” made Military Times’ best books list in 2015. In it, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Marine writes about an Afghan boy’s developing awareness of ethics and loyalty.

His second, “Dark at the Crossing,” is on the Times’ 2017 list and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In Syria, an Iraqi-born American is in search of a sense of belonging, of self-worth.

With his third book, Ackerman achieves again, a remarkable literary feat. The Marine of few words (but precise ones) sets the barren garden of “Eden” mostly at Camp Lejeune and in a burn center, and he again tackles themes including ethics, loyalty, belonging, self-worth — plus the meaning of love.

“Eden” is small and short enough to be considered a novella. The form is ephemeral but the impact is not. The premise is reminiscent of 1939’s “Johnny Got His Gun,” in which a World War I soldier has no arms, legs, eyes, ears, mouth and nose but represents author Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war face. But “Eden” is not overtly political.

Before service, Eden Malcom treats life “like it was a series of cliffs that existed for no other reason than for him to jump off,” but those hops stop after a blast in Hamrin Valley. Now, “the 70 pounds that’s left of him” lie in a bed. “They’ve cut all of him off up to the torso,” and he has all three degrees of burns, his skin “tight and crumbled like wax paper.” He is “the most wounded man from both the wars.”

His wife, Mary, outwardly devoted during years at the hospital, knows the burden of being “forced to give up their best days to tend to someone else’s worst.” The book’s otherworldly narrator — a Marine who dies in the same Humvee explosion in Hamrin — delicately and unhurriedly unfolds surprises about the couple’s relationship to each other, to him, and to the child Andy (short for Andromeda, like the galaxy).

To call the trio a “love triangle” misses the point and the tone, which touches the ethereal, as does “Dark” (in which a character imagines “the seeds in the girls’ pocket growing shoots that would swaddle them beneath the earth”). Everyone in “Eden” has a way of waiting for Eden to go on or not, and you may decide whether their plight symbolizes wars that never end.

Finding Sgt. Kent by Raymond Hutson, Koehlerbooks, 208 pages, $16.

The author, a doctor with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, “never went to war.” But he “spent 10 years or so caring for veterans of half a dozen wars, in VA hospitals, listening to their stories.” Evidently, he pays attention to professors and patients.

His first novel is a well-constructed portrayal of sniper Army Master Sgt. Robert Kent’s return home after almost two decades’ service, which includes three tours in Afghanistan, two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.

No longer in battle, “Kent is no longer the master of his world, which now includes civilians.

“It’s weird. In the Army everybody’s on the same side,” Kent says. “Here, everybody’s for themselves,” and he thinks everyone is afraid of him.

“Then you’ll need to be an ambassador of good will,” his VA shrink admonishes.

Diplomatically, Kent sets out on his northwest passage. His father never returned from Vietnam and his mother died when he was 15, and his goal is to find remnants of his family. When he locates grandparents who want to embrace their grandson, he feels “trapped, like an imposter who had no business eliciting so much sorrow, or elation.”

His travels bring danger and pain – and a reunion with a fellow soldier.

“Maybe we can protect each other,” she says. “But you’re going to have to forgive yourself.”

He tries, and Hutson helps.

The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon by Kathleen J. McInnis, Post Hill, 272 pages, $16.

The author is a “base brat” and Air Force daughter with a Ph.D. in war studies, a CV that lists the Defense Department, a chapter in “Strategy Strikes Back” and, in December, a book about NATO and Afghanistan. Heady stuff.

Relax. Her first novel is a comedy of military manners, ambitiously promoted as “The Devil Wears Prada” meets the Pentagon. Maybe not so much. How about “Ms. Adventures in the Pentagon”?

Dr. Heather Reilly, sister of a posthumous recipient of a Medal of Honor, is anti-war, and, ironically, she’s about to plunge into the Pentagon, the last place she ever expects to work. Her heart skips — twice — as she joins “a wave of somber commuters” in Virginia.

After a vapid Pentagon indoctrination, she astutely wonders why they “don’t talk about defense policy in a training course about defense policy.” With equal curiosity, she questions those policies, and her procedural mistakes evolve — you see this coming — into manifestations of official policy.

Meanwhile, she finds an additional purpose in work and life: The memory of her brother.

“If Jon had someone like me back in the Pentagon, maybe he wouldn’t have had to use his body to protect the soldiers around him.”

Jon’s service reminds readers often that the novel and Heather have a conscience.

“Heart” beats perkily — until a terrorist strike abruptly changes the mood and creates “one of those moments” in life “when you feel like something momentous is about to occur” at the office.

“For good or bad, better or worse, the universe is about to shuffle the deck, and the cards will lie where they fall.” Under the weight of cliché, “Ms. Adventures” falls too.

Indivisible: A Novelization by Travis Thrasher, Nelson, 336 pages, $16.

This is the novel based on the movie based on a “true story,” and each coincides with the publication of “Indivisible: On Marriage Under God,” a devotional book. Starring three of TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy” actors, the motion picture opened in 800 theaters Oct. 26.

Instead of eat, pray, love, it’s read, pray, watch. As a result, “Indivisible” could have its 15 minutes’ fame in the media and culture this month, and some will think the news cusp runneth over.

Nobody expects a “novelization” to be literature, and “Indivisible” is not. Yet, even a cynic acquiesces to its sentimentality. Never mind the literary quandary of whether a novel about a living couple is fiction or biography. To the publisher, it’s “fiction.”

The pair is Army chaplain Darren Turner and his wife, Heather, whose faith demands his deploying while Heather home schools the three kids — and befriends two wives whose husbands are also in Iraq. War is hell for the man of Heaven, especially after a soldier loses his legs and another dies.

While the toll is called up yonder, Darren wonders what kind of God permits bad things to happen. He isolates himself from everyone except his devil of a companion, post-traumatic stress, and home becomes hell, too. Learning the dying soldier’s last words — they are a hats off to his chaplaincy — Darren finds comfort amid despair. He is reminded that “each step of the ladder of his life had led to this place,” and a reader quickly figures that it’ll soon be onward for the Christian soldier.

Machete Squad by Brent Dulak, Kevin Knodell and David Axe with illustrations by Per Darwin Berg, Dead Reckoning, 160 pages, $19.

Get past the cover image, which looks like Freddy Kreuger’s cousin and conflicts with the tone of a sensitive story. Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Dulak relives his experiences as a sergeant in charge of a medical unit that ties off amputations — “machete medicine” — as a routine duty.

Inside, relying on few words and a talented illustrator to fill in the cerebral blanks, the effective memoir is a peek into the mind of the young soldier with doubts — “I don’t want to do this “ — before he deploys to Afghanistan in 2012.

“You guys need to just not die until the Afghan Army takes over security next year,” he hears upon arrival.

While in Sperwan Ghar he recalls being in Iraq, where he defies an officer who wants no part of wounded Iraqi children.

“This facility is for coalition casualties. We can’t take all these Hadjis,” the major tells him.

“I’m going to bring you every casualty that comes in,” he replies. “Whatever you decide to do is on you.”

The austere settings are vast in scale yet feel intimate, as though you are seeing the world through Dulak’s eyes. Berg’s drawings expertly use color (warm and cool) and depth (shadows and angles) to convey desolation that looks destructive and mountains that look mysterious.

The ’Stan by Kevin Knodell and David Axe; illustrations by Blue Delliquanti, Dead Reckoning, 128 pages, $17.

The editor says the U.S. is entering its 18th year in Afghanistan and “men and women will soon be fighting a war that started before they were born.”

The writers sustain the theme in 17 short reports, each in the eye of veterans — military and civilian. But if ’Stan itself remains a work in progress after nearly two decades, “‘Stan” feels incomplete also.

Unlike reality, the narratives are over before you know it. The content is familiar to a military readership, even if the format is different.

You know: A soldier buys Chinese machine guns from a Pakistani. An Afghanistan interpreter tries to get his family out of there. A Hooters server proves “women have been in combat this entire war.” Stateside veterans decry fireworks on the Fourth.

As art, “’Stan” feels more “Doonesbury” than dire, and some characters’ eyes are as round as Sgt. Orville P. Snorkel’s in “Beetle Bailey.” The mixed visual messages inadvertently demonstrate the challenge in presenting serious narrative — whether nonfiction or novel or news — as art. How do you show dramatic action in “graphic novel” form without ending up resembling a newspaper’s comics section?

The Best of Don Winslow of the Navy: A Collection of High-Seas Stories from Comics’ Most Daring Sailor edited by Craig Yoe, Dead Reckoning, 272 pages, $30.

The fiction portion of the NIP plunge into graphic storytelling shines in this reprint from the World War II era.

Don, a Superman in sailor’s uniform, was created by a World War I veteran and Navy reservist when the Navy needed a marketing gimmick to recruit men from “the “landlocked” Midwest.

The “tall, stalwart, handsome” Winslow is called to serve between the 1930s and 1950s in comic books, on radio and in a movie serial. The “Best” reproduces action-filled suspense and is charming despite its reflecting a period when only brave white men and decorative and-or deceitful white women populated popular culture.

Winslow is always in dress uniform and always quick to use his fist on bad guys. When his foil is the physically strong female population of Amazon Island, he uses mirrors to distract the ladies. “All women are alike when they get in front of a mirror,” the clever commander says. (Where he gets the full-length glass is unexplained.)

Update the dated social norms and “Don” is a model for today’s illustrators and thriller writers.

Trench Dogs by Ian Densford, Dead Reckoning, 184 pages, $19.

In this contemporary view of World War I, “Dogs” has 528 continuous panels (each roughly 2” x 5”) that narrate, without text balloons, outrageous early 20th Century war-fighting practices.

The story is continuous, like the single-tracking shot of Dunkirk in the movie “Atonement.” The information is from documented history but the telling is fresh. Even without a dog in the fight, you’ll agree that using countless canine characters as soldiers is a clever move, one that allows troops to seem like the human-faceless fodder their nations consider them to be.

Author-illustrator Densford uses thick lines to draw the myriad, muddy mutts as they are hit by machines on land, in air and at sea. His art looks like the school-boy doodles by an untrained doughboy — down to “BAM” and “BOOM” labels, which are intrusive and, given the success of the drawings, unnecessary.

Want more? These books are noted but not reviewed.

FICTION

Ohio by Stephen Markley, Simon & Schuster, 496 pages, $26.

A funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq opens this first novel, about classmates 10 years after graduation. Another classmate is “a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq” whose home for a date with a “sweetheart he’s tried to forget.”

Dark Winter: A Jake Mahegan Novel by Anthony J. Tata, Kensington, 464 pages, $26.

Former Delta Force Capt. Mahegan, in his fifth thriller by the Fox News commentator and retired Army brigadier general, fights cyber terrorists who pull the plug on defense operations and power grids.

Man of War: An Eric Steele Novel by Sean Parnell, Morrow, 368 pages, $28.

The Afghanistan veteran who (with a co-author) wrote the 2012 memoir, “Outlaw Platoon,” about serving with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, writes a first thriller about an Afghanistan veteran in clandestine service.

A Borrowing of Bones by Paula Munier, St. Martin’s, 352 pages, $27.

In the first of a series, says the optimistic publisher, a retired soldier and her retired Belgian Malinois military working dog — plus a game warden and his canine — solve a mystery and “keep the citizens of Vermont safe.”

American Journal: 50 Poems for Our Time edited by Tracy K. Smith, Graywolf and Library of Congress, 128 pages, $14.

The anthology of contemporary poetry selected by the U.S. Poet Laureate includes “Phantom Noise” by Army veteran Brian Turner and “The Long Deployment” by Jehanne Dubrow, the wife of a Navy officer.

Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan, Ig (CQ) , 256 pages, $17.

On the road from Ireland to California in the 1990s with three Irish men, including one who suffers from traumatic stress after three years in Sarajevo.

The Iceman by P.T. Deutermann, St. Martin’s, 320 pages, $27.

The titular Iceman cometh for German then Japanese ships in this suspense tale, and his crew wonders whether “their iron-willed skipper will bring them home alive.” The 21st novel by a retired Navy captain.

Without Fear: A Hunter Stark Novel by Col. David Hunt and R.J. Pineiro, Forge, 528 pages, $30.

The Fox News analyst and retired Army officer and his co-author offer a thriller with a buried Soviet nuclear bomb, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Russian mafia and the Mossad. What could possibly go wrong?

War Debris: Tales of the Old Army by Emmett E. Slake, Mill City, 265 pages, $16.

Twenty-one “fictional meanderings” by a 30-year Army veteran whose service “encompassed” the Korean and Vietnam wars.

NONFICTION

African American Officers in Liberia: A Pestiferous Rotation, 1910-1942 by Brian G. Shellum, Potomac, 306 pages, $22

A retired Army officer looks at “a monumental piece of missing American history”: Why 17 black officers were “instruments of imperialism” while training forces in West Africa. How’d it go? “Pestiferous” is a clue.

Valley Forge by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $30.

This story of “an underdog United States toppling an empire” notes George Washington’s political prowess in fighting both the British and the critics in Congress.

War Animals: The Unsung Heroes of World War II by Robin Hutton, Regnery, 466 pages, $30.

With the release of this “heart-warming” history, the “dogs, horses, mules, pigeons — and even one cat” who served in the fight against Germany and Japan are no longer unsung.

Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On” by Leigh Neville, Osprey, 352 pages, $30.

The Australian military writer carefully revisits and documents what happens in Somalia October 1993 and, in an appendix, what happens in the 2001 movie that didn’t really happen in real life.

A Fierce Glory: Antietam — the Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery by Justin Martin, Da Capo, 336 pages, $28.

The biographer of Frederick Olmsted, Walt Whitman and Alan Greenspan turns to Sept. 17, 1862, and the fight beside a creek near Sharpsburg, Md., where 3,654 soldiers die on “America’s bloodiest day.”

Fallout: Conspiracy, Cover-Up and the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Peter Watson, PublicAffairs, 432 pages, $28.

The journalist and historian says “a series of lies, pretenses and deceptions between the Allies resulted in the most dangerous killing machine in history.”

The Escape Artists: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War by Neal Bascomb, Houghton, 336 pages, $28.

British prisoners want to break out of Holzminden, “a land-locked Alcatraz” run by a German commandant who doesn’t want anybody to leave the place alive. At the end of the book is a list of escapees — and the “recaptured.”

Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion by Edward G. Lengel, Da Capo, 368 pages, $28.

Devastation and survival in the Argonne forest in World War I . The focus is on three soldiers (Maj. Charles Whittlesey, Capt. George McMurtry and Sgt. Alvin York) and a journalist (Damon Runyan).

Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam by Robert K. Brigham, Public Affairs, 320 pages, $28.

“Personal political rivalries and strategic confusion” drive the secretary of state. Based on “recently released material” from the Nixon Presidential Library, Kissinger’s papers at Yale, and archives in Ho Chi Minh City.

The Returned: They Left to Wage Jihad, Now They’re Back by David Thomson, translated by Gregory Flanders, Polity, 240 pages, $20.

The French journalist interviews men and women who went to Syria to join jihadist groups, and he analyzes the “social, religious, political, familial and psychological factors that push people to violent extremism.”

Operation Kinetic: Stabilizing Kosovo by Sean M. Mahoney, Potomac, 512 pages, $39.

The Royal Military College of Canada historian and author of books about Afghanistan and nuclear weapons turns to NATO’s Kosovo Force to “provide a blueprint for stabilizing operations around the world.”

Sword and Scimitar: 14 Centuries of War Between Islam and the West by Raymond Ibrahim, Da Capo, 352 pages, $28.

The most recent of the eight battles in this survey occurs in 1683. The current war between the religious states, including the Islamic State one, is nothing new, and the West ought to remember that.

Tin Can Titans: The Heroic Men and Ships of World War II’s Most Decorated Navy Destroyer Squadron by John Wukovits, Da Capo, 352 pages, $19.

The 2017 book is the recipient of the year’s Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature.

Here is a roundup of 15 reviews presented in order of reading value and satisfaction. You’ll see books about the heavy cruiser Indianapolis, weapons that can’t weep, the Unknown Soldier’s pallbearers, what it’s like to be shot by the Taliban, surviving capture in Syria, and a Marine veteran’s third thriller. (Prices are from the publishers; you may find better deals online.)

Plus: A heads-up about 26 other new titles.

NONFICTION

Touching the Dragon: And Other Techniques for Surviving Life’s Wars by James Hatch and Christian D’Andrea, Knopf, 336 pages, $29.

Just when you think you cannot bear to read another memoir by another SEAL, an irresistible one — a book, not a SEAL— surfaces.

The former senior chief and dog handler likes “smashing Stigma” and thinks “rah-rah books about the Navy’s Action Man crews sometimes cheat the reader of something: The dark places, the brokenness.” He dives into both in engaging ways — anecdotal and antidotal —that make you smile and might inspire you.

He decries “the video-game-ification of war.” He and his co-author take you on the real “Speeding Train” of special operations, including a team effort to find the missing soldier Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. (“We were close.”)

He is severely injured, is embarrassed when he screams in pain, and during recovery languishes in a “coffin of condemnation” that is part of his “regimen of feeling sorry for myself.” You’ll get these points on their first mention.

But “shame that stays a secret will kill you,” and he confronts his truth. By using cognitive behavioral therapy, he “keeps at bay” the dragon of discontent that torments him, and he discovers that trauma is universal.

“Life is combat. For most of us.” Including dogs. He’s especially fond of “hair missile” Spike, who dies after “I failed to protect him,” and he founds Spikes K9 Fund. Unfortunately, several pages about the nonprofit’s work interrupt the narrative flow and might work better as an epilogue.

His human heroes include the fellow SEAL he calls Fly Fisherman, a guy who shows “disproportionate commitment” to Hatch’s health, and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.

“I was shot in the leg. Gabby was shot in the head” and is “a machine of positivity and strength. She was the anti-me.”

Fight Like a Girl: The Truth Behind How Female Marines are Trained by Kate Germano with Kelly Kennedy, Prometheus, 288 pages, $18.

The retired lieutenant colonel validates her “wholehearted Marine-ness” and indicts her Corps’ reluctance to make all recruits meet similar standards, mainly because her commanders (Germano names names) “wanted women to serve only in support roles.”

In her role as commander of female training at Parris Island, “I was showing that [women] could” meet Corps expectations in “marksmanship, physical fitness, and leadership” — while the Corps “put together a study to show that they could not. This is why I was fired” in 2015.

And this is why, in his chapter, husband Joe Plenzler (also a retired Marine lieutenant colonel) says the Corps “started leaking information to the press” — regarding Germano’s dismissal — “in a complete violation of their own release-of-information policies.”

Germano and co-author Kennedy (an Army veteran and former Military Times staffer) bluntly vindicate the career Marine who naively believes that “if the women within my command were strong they would be safe” from sexism — and worse. The numbers are timely and telling during the #MeToo era. Germano says 32,000 male recruits are — separately — trained annually, compared with 3,200 women.

“It is staggering to consider how much talent the Marine Corps misses out on each year.”

Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the 50-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic, Simon and Schuster, 544 pages, $28 (release date: July 10).

Another history of the sinking in World War II takes a wide berth at launch, describing the heavy cruiser Indianapolis as a “grand but svelte” ship “born from soil as American as the men who sailed her.”

Vincent, the Navy veteran who “collaborated” with Sarah Palin on “Going Rogue,” and Vladic, who directed “USS Indianapolis: The Legacy” (2015) and has been interviewing survivors for two decades, invite you to “roll the film backward” and “watch her rise.”

She does, thanks to less-grandiose descriptions of the sad yet infuriating story.

Men — boys as young as 17 — drift five nights while enduring attacks by sharks and each other. Of the 1,196 souls aboard ship, “three of every four men” die.

There are details about top-secret cargo — uranium for the Enola Gay — and about cowardly admirals “blaming each other in secret while the court-martial of Captain McVay was going in public.” Especially poignant is the fact that Charles McVay kills himself in 1968 but is posthumously exonerated in 2000 — 55 years after the plunge.

The Navy withholds news about the July attack by Japanese torpedoes until V-J Day, when “the joyous news of the Japanese surrender would render the Indianapolis disaster a comparative footnote” to the public … but not to the survivors and, later, journalist Richard Newcomb and other historians.

The book’s “Final Log Entry” is from the Philippine Sea, where a remote video camera shows the wreckage 18,000 feet below the surface in 2017. Watching the evidence, a survivor recounts “holding dying shipmates in his arms in the very same water.”

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre, Norton, 448 pages, $28.

The defense analyst is “not a technologist” but he could play one on TV, given his reader-friendly and conversational handling of a formidable topic: Smart weapons can’t weep.

From a clever title (remember the “Army of One” slogan?) to the simple diagrams that almost make up for the uninspired jacket art, and for references to “Terminator,” “Jeopardy!” and Disney’s “Fantasia,” his book fulfills its promise: To “guide you on a journey through the rapidly evolving world of next-generation robotic weapons.”

The arms are revolutionary, and “the trend of creeping automation that began with Gatling’s gun will continue.” Scharre carries an M249 squad automatic weapon as a Ranger, leads the group that drafts the Defense Department’s autonomous-weapons policy in 2012, and is a fellow at the Center for New American Security.

He interviews experts in every aspect, including ethics, of the challenges that efficient but irresponsible combat machines introduce. Could someone “leverage commercially available drones to make a do-it-yourself autonomous weapon?” Yes. “I was terrified by what I found.”

You might be scared when you are reminded that even though reputable nations sign rules of engagement (there’s a seven-page table of the status of banned weapons), some non-states — a group such as ISIS, let’s say — are outside those expectations. Disappointingly, the author gives the rogue-state problem little ink.

But there’s other stuff to worry about. “If autonomous weapons are the kind of thing that keep you up at night, militarized advance AI (artificial intelligence) is pure nightmare fuel.”

The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home by Patrick K. O’Donnell, Atlantic Monthly, 288 pages, $27.

Transpose the billing in the subtitle. The history is mainly about the little-known doughboy Body Bearers for the entombed anonymous soldier.

In telling the combat experiences of the eight men — from the Army (including a Native American), Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Artillery Corps — the historian recaps the war (much of which is not exactly unknown), including “hideous losses” at Belleau Wood. His research is a respectful recognition of the lives and sacrifices of the bearers, including two Medal of Honor recipients, selected by Army Gen. John J. Pershing for duty at Arlington Cemetery in 1921.

O’Donnell’s effort is exemplary except for repeated references, four pages apart, to 128 American deaths among the sinking of the Lusitania … and its “12,000” dead. (Google it.) Try to overlook the editing glitch and dwell instead on the battlegrounds. There you’ll see the hell below what the author terms “America’s greatest memorial.”

Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France by Stephen A. Bourque, Naval Institute, 376 pages $35.

Collateral damage from aerial bombing is not just a contemporary matter and not always acknowledged.

A sympathetic Army veteran surveys the devastation of German-occupied France during World War II and says that “its scale, nature and effects are almost unknown in the English-speaking world.”

Official reports do not always reflect reality. One example is the destruction of Nantes, which “receives only a passing comment, with no details, in the Air Force’s official history of the conflict.”

Early in 1944, “if you lived near a French rail yard or factory, near a harbor or along the coast in Pas-de-Calais, you lived under the constant threat of Allied bombardment” as the “Royal Air Force Bomber Command and the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces dropped more bombs on occupied France than on Germany.”

Bourque says “civilian deaths were part of the human sacrifice that contributed to the Allied victory on June 6.”

Blindsided by the Taliban: A Journalist’s Story of War, Trauma, Love and Loss by Carmen Gentile, Skyhorse, 240 pages, $25.

An intrepid freelancer bares his aspirations and asininities in his memoir, in which self-deprecation and self-indulgence are peppered with ribaldry.

War in eastern Afghanistan is “one long slog through the mountains after another, up and down, day after day” — until he shoots video near Combat Outpost Pirtle-King and turns to find what his subjects are looking at: A rocket’s green glare “screaming right for me,” hitting “me square in the face.”

But he sees the bright side. “This little incident is just the kick in the ass I need to quit smoking cigarettes,” and besides, “I’ll just rock an eye patch.”

Instead, recovery’s “perpetual negation,” including unsurprisingly unlucky female relationships, perpetuate his “ability to recognize my problem and a penchant for ignoring that recognition.”

An assignment takes him back to scene of the blinding launch on his third return visit to the mountains, where he finds that reporting is rehabilitating. “Oddly, only in Afghanistan am I able to really laugh again.”

The Dawn Prayer (Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison): A Memoir by Matthew Schrier, BenBella, 312 pages, $25.

Al-Qaida’s branch in Syria, al-Nusra Front, holds the freelance photojournalist captive for seven months in 2013. This is a blow-by-blow of isolation, starvation, filth, bugs and other torture forms.

That the book is a not an obituary written by somebody else is testament to the writer’s savvy and mettle toward his captors and toward his roommate assignment, a fellow but ugly American.

You are there, but you must endure near-deprivation of context — about the terrorists or the territory, about whether editors care that he is not transmitting photographs, about whether his feeling “betrayed by the FBI’s handling of my case” is justified. How does the FBI typically handle such cases?

A cover blurb calls this “one of the most terrifying and suspenseful books I’ve ever read,” a comment that makes your reviewer think the blurb-er read a different book. The jacket also says “Matthew has devoted himself to working with the US Military” to “educate American troops about survival after capture by extremists.” Pray the training does not include force-reading.

Coffin Corner Boys: One Bomber, Ten Men, and Their Incredible Escape from Nazi Occupied France by Carole Engle Avriett with Capt. George W. Starks, Regnery, 360 pages, $29.

Their B-17’s vulnerable formation spot is called the coffin corner because “you were most likely to have your ass shot down from there” — and when their plane is shot during its first mission, the men jump. Thanks to French citizens, some men arduously and dangerously get out. No thanks to the Germans, two get sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Based on interviews with pilot Starks and families of other crew members, the book employs an oral-history format that mostly allows the men of the 92nd Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force to speak in first person, a form that provides tone in otherwise ordinary writing, similar to the next book.

No Forgotten Fronts: From Classrooms to Combat by Lisa K. Shapiro, Naval Institute, 392 pages, $30.

A professor wants San Diego State College (now University) friends to stay in touch while they’re overseas during World War II. However, in 1942, a Facebook group is not an option.

Instead, Dr. Lauren Post asks students to send mail. They do, and monthly he prints their correspondence. Within two years The Aztec News Letter reaches “800 men overseas,” 2,000 service members in the U.S. and 500 students on campus. By war’s end, the Post office collects 4,500 letters.

Readers then and now relive the routine and the wrenching: A pilot in North Africa in 1943 hopes “this war will wipe out racial and political boundaries, uniting the world in an intelligent peace,” and two months later the lieutenant who sang in “The Desert Song” on campus dies.

This is a collection of excerpts from those published excerpts. “The simple, beautiful, profound prose” conveys “for me the meaning of war,” Shapiro writes, and she is correct. Did other schools produce similar publications? She doesn’t say.

SELF-HELP

Struggle Well: Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma by Ken Falke and Josh Goldberg, Lioncrest, 217 pages, $16.

Navy veteran Falke and civilian Goldberg personally deal with the subject, and their book is a framework of their efforts at the nonprofit Boulder Crest Institute, which Falke founded.

“Everyone struggles, and everyone can learn to struggle well.” If their suggestion sounds like a contradiction, recall Samuel Beckett’s admonition to “fail better” next time.

“We’re not mental health experts,” the pair says, but “we’ve seen through our work the transformative success of what a program like ours does for somebody” — in their count, “thousands” of participants.

They write affirmatively about spiritual wellness that “is not religious” and strives for balance, about how to turn stress into strength — with tips that might be useful even if you never visit the Virginia or Arizona facilities.

Conquer Anything: A Green Beret’s Guide to Building Your A-Team by Greg Stube with Frank Miniter, Post Hill Press, 208 pages, $26.

The former Army Special Forces medical sergeant (“only a certain kind of dude will be a pecker checker”) later “the Green Beret’s [sic] first official spokesperson” veers into memoir and management: “The secret to execution is defining and assigning actionable goals to the right people.”

He cites Citizens United’s fighting “the campaign-finance restrictions that muzzled their free speech near elections,” philosopher Ayn Rand, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, musician Pharrell (“Happy”) Williams, and there’s a blurb from National Rifle Association president Oliver North, a former Marine.

The 23-year soldier says that until he was injured in Afghanistan, “the warrior persona” defined him. Now, “I want men to embrace the feminine virtues that have made their lives whole and which have been the centerpiece of our culture.” After all, “a mother makes a place a home.”

A father can too, some might add.

FICTION

Cherry by Nico Walker, Knopf, 336 pages, $27 (Aug. 14 release date).

The debut novel by an Army medic and veteran of “more than 250 missions” in Iraq might be the year’s only prominent fiction by an author serving “an 11-year sentence for bank robbery.”

His status, noted by the publisher, will likely intrigue some reviewers and readers. Publisher’s Weekly terms the work a “fictionalized account of the author’s exceptional life.”

Yet the civilian life of the author’s unnamed narrator ends is routine: Day after day of drugs and sex and robbing banks for money to buy more drugs and more time for more sex. Paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, the protagonist wonders “if youth wasn’t wasted on me,” and he leaves little doubt.

Adulthood is no better. At 25, he doesn’t “understand what it is that people do. It’s as if all this were built on nothing,” on indifference, including “enlisting in the Army because I’d been saying I would.”

In the military, everything is “all make-believe” and “the drill sergeants were just pretending to be drill sergeants. We were pretending to be soldiers. The Army was pretending to be the Army.”

Active duty means having to listen to “the Toby Keith song” at Army ceremonies and in bars and having to endure PT. “Most of us could do push-ups. And were the outcomes of all the wars decided by push-ups and idle talk, America might never lose.” Fort Hood is “bleak, a new kind of desert, engineered to induce fatalism in the young. It worked like a charm.”

His advice? “Don’t ever join.”

However, war is where the novel works best. Combat compels the soldier opportunity to stand up for something, finally, to interact with passion. He talks a lieutenant out of a disastrous decision potentially affecting his brothers, who are “just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as f[–k], dumber than shit.”

The latter expletive in that sentence is the narrator’s go-to word: Dumber than it. Somebody isn’t it. “I’m not trying to start any” of it. Talking “s—” about whatever. These examples are from one page, and other pages are full of it. His vocabulary limit, perhaps induced by there being “nothing better than to be young and on heroin,” becomes a listless list, and that’s a challenge for a reader and an author. Inner euphoria does not translate into outer eloquence or character development.

Still, “Cherry” is worth picking up, an imaginative work that shows Walker’s potential to ripen.

Field of Valor: A Thriller by Matthew Betley, Bestler, 400 pages, $26.

The mission continues for former Force Reconnaissance Marine Logan West.

This time he performs “reckless brave acts of heroism” with his newly organized team of four, including a strong female. (Let’s hope she is being groomed to star in her own thriller in a genre full of manly men).

The commander in chief asks Team West to “put a stop to the mess” created by insurgents inside a global, corporate-backed entity that rules the world from under the conference table. (The premise is a staple in current mili-thrillers.)

What if the courageous quartet needs to break a law or two in the process of saving in America? No problem. The president already signed pardons for any potential crimes — an offer that seems like today’s news.

Betley knows the thriller formula, and the situations from Quantico to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s suburban branch are exciting, and occasionally wry.

A TV station’s helicopter hovers to cover an attack on a highway, and on the ground a Secret Service agent discovers that the aircraft actually contains bad guys in journalists’ clothing.

“It’s a fake news helicopter,” he ascertains. The line is worth the price of the book.

Permanent Change of Station by Lisa Stice, Middle West, 96 pages, $12.

Mary Cassatt’s 1878 painting of a girl and dog and the Marines’ 2017 photograph of a Humvee in “the Middle East” share the cover and the author’s mind in the second collection by a Marine spouse and mother.

Her everyday epiphanies are about parenthood, pets and perseverance “while Daddy patrols/someone else’s night.” The titular poem asks why assignments are called “permanent” when they are not. Stice concedes that any move makes us “permanently changed.”

Readers of Sun Tzu, Shel Silverstein and others might see how the pieces borrow (and credit) their words. And some of the 60 short observations go to the dogs. Honest.

Here’s the 11-word “New Trick”: “Wave bye-bye./The dog raises a shaky paw/receives a treat.”

NOTED, NOT REVIEWED: FICTION

Anatomy of a Miracle: The True Story of a Paralyzed Veteran, a Mississippi Convenience Store, a Vatican Investigation, and the Spectacular Perils of Grace by Jonathan Miles, Hogarth, 368 pages, $27.

• Fake nuance: An Army veteran who is disabled in Afghanistan gets out of his wheelchair — in a novel that is not a “true” story.

Reaper: Ghost Target — A Sniper Novel by Nicholas Irving with A.J. Tata, St. Martin’s, 336 pages, $27.

• Former Ranger and memoirist (“The Reaper,” “The Way of the Reaper”) Irving, nickname “Reaper,” sticks to his word. “Reaper” Harwood stars in this thriller written with former general and thrillerist Tata.

The Secret to Southern Charm by Kristy Woodson Harvey, Gallery, 400 pages, $16.

• In the second Peachtree Bluff Series novel, a mother goes on after her Army husband is declared missing. The author credits the aforementioned, busy Tata for “talking me through some of the finer points of military life.”

Tom Clancy’s Op-Center for Honor by Jeff Rovin, St. Martin’s, 352 pages, $17.

• The deceased novelist’s imitable style lives on in this thriller about Cold War missiles resurfacing in Russia, part of a series “created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik” but written by a — not in — third person.

The Moscow Offensive by Dale Brown, Morrow, 448 pages, $29.

• Russians infiltrate the U.S. of an “inept” female commander in chief. Enter the Iron Wolf Squadron and its Cybernetic Infantry Devices — “12-foot-tall humanoid combat robots.” A thriller by a former Air Force captain.

Boston Burning by Eric D. Salin, Amazon Digital, 370 pages, $3.

• The Vietnam-veteran Marine and university professor pits an international terrorist against an Army veteran in an FBI counterterrorism unit; “neither will follow the rules” in this cheap thriller.

Civil War Two by Randall Collins, Maren Ink, two volumes, 412 pages and 326 pages, $16 each.

• The subtitle of the two-part novel is “America Elects a President Determined to Restore Religion to Public Life, and The Nation Splits.” There’s a war between religious and secular states. Avoid the conflict.

Check Canopy by Jack Welsh, Outskirts, 158 pages, $14.

• In this autobiographical novel, a retired Army colonel with a transplanted kidney recounts the career of Frank, an Army colonel with kidney disease. The lesson: After you jump, check your canopy.

NOTED, NOT REVIEWED: NONFICTION

Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence by James R. Clapper with Trey Brown, Viking, 432 pages, $30.

• The Obama-era National Intelligence director — earlier he went from Marine reservist to Air Force lieutenant general — and his former speechwriter offer a look at his career and at collusion. … Uh, the Russians are coming.

The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies by Michael V. Hayden, Penguin, 304 pages, $28.

• Uh, they’re already here: The former four-star Air Force general, CIA head and National Security Agency director offers his perspective on what and who — including a commander in chief — threatens national security.

Strategy Strikes Back: How ‘Star Wars’ Explains Modern Military Conflict edited by Max Brooks, John Amble, ML Cavanaugh and Jaym Gates, Potomac, 272 pages, $30.

• Combine a witty title and jacket typography with 30 “top military and strategic experts” and you’ll find a galaxy of analyses about the “balance, care and empathy to achieve the strategic advantage we need.”

You’ll Never Walk by Andy Grant with Phil Reade, deCoubertin, 308 pages, $20.

• His tattoo says “You’ll never walk alone.” Until Afghanistan, when the Royal Marine loses a leg rather than hobble on it. Surgery severs the word “alone” — but Grant becomes “the fastest one-legged man in the world.”

Global Security Cultures by Mary Kaldor, Polity, 224 pages, $23.

• The London professor asks why “politicians think that war is the answer to terror when military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere has made things worse? Good question.

On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes, Chicago, 224 pages, $22.

• A Princeton literature professor who was a Marine pilot in World War II collects his essays and reviews about the way veterans and civilians express their feelings about war.

Women at War: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment by Vera Hildebrand, Naval Institute, 344 pages, $30.

• Survivors of a female regiment considered a “radical military innovation” in 1943 describe combat against British rule in India.

1918: Winning the War, Losing the War edited by Matthias Strohn, Osprey, 304 pages, $28.

• “Some of the best historians from around the world,” including three Americans (two former Army officers), analyze the main players’ last year in the conflict.

Hadrian’s Wall by Adrian Goldworthy, Basic, 192 pages, $25.

• A professor from Wales takes some of the mystery out of the great wall in this study of the people who utilized the barrier, “a place where barbarism began.” Or ended, maybe.

Cashing In on Cyberpower: How Interdependent Actors Seek Economic Outcomes in Digital World by Mark T. Peters II, Potomac, 280 pages, $42.

• How leaders use cyber tools influentially, according to an Air Force intelligence officer.

The War Against the Vets: The World War I Bonus Army During the Great Depression by Jerome Tuccille, Potomac, 264 pages, $33.

• In “one of the sorriest chapters in American history,” veterans — called “protestors” when “protesters” is correct — demonstrate for a benefit detractors say is a “giveaway” the country cannot afford.

Sgt. Rodney M. Davis: The Making of a Hero by John D. Hollis, Hugo House, 218 pages, $18.

• A nephew-in-law eulogizes the Medal of Honor recipient’s bravery in segregated Georgia and in Vietnam, where the African-American Marine saves his comrades by smothering a grenade in 1967.

Bloody Sixteen: The USS Oriskany and Air Wing 16 During the Vietnam War by Peter Fey, Potomac, 440 pages, $33.

• The aircraft carrier’s three deployments in “the most dangerous phases of Operation Rolling Thunder” — from a retired Navy commander.

A Tiger Among Us: A Story of Valor in Vietnam’s Shau Valley by Bennie G. Adkins and Katie Lamar Jackson, DaCapo, 224 pages, $27.

• Forty-eight years after his 1966 bravery, the retired Army command sergeant major receives a Medal of Honor. In this memoir, he grows up in Oklahoma and grows courage in combat.

NOTED, NOT REVIEWED: MORE SELF-HELP

Out of Uniform: Your Guide to a Successful Military-to-Civilian Career Transition by Tom Wolfe, Potomac, 296 pages, $25.

• The second edition of coaching tips from a Naval Academy graduate and “expert in the field.”

Victory: Seven Revolutionary Strategies for Entrepreneurs to Launch Your Business, Elevate Your Impact and Transform Your Life by Larry Broughton, Bandera, 236 pages, $20.

• The former Army staff sergeant, now CEO of his eponymous hotels, has a new version of his 2011 book.

Taking Back Your Life: Transition from Military to Civilian Life by Thomas E. Whittingslow, CreateSpace, 150 pages, $13.

• The former Marine and soldier, an octogenarian, interviews veterans and he offers guidance with help from a clinical social worker.

The Momentum of Hope: Personal Stories of Moral Injury by Volunteers of America, 196 pages, $25.

• A dozen military veterans are among 30 people who share their experiences and consciences in this collection of essays produced by the faith-based nonprofit.

Check out our spring reviews below, in order of reading value and satisfaction. Prices are provided by the publishers; you may find better deals online or in your local bookstore.

Click here for our spring military fiction reviews.

Eat the Apple: A Memoir by Matt Young, Bloomsbury, 251 pages, $26.

This Recruit and You and I and We, in alternating voices, go from Marine boot camp to war and back, from 18-year-old boy to Young man.

Sound familiar? Maybe, but this is not your standard point-and-shoot remembrance. This is a fresh, imaginative reflection full of revelations about becoming a fighter and bemoaning being one.

“We become grunts … meat for the grinder,” says the veteran of three Iraq deployments (one voluntary). “We want to pay for what we think might be the sins accrued in our hard lives by the time we are 19 through violent death and become tragic heroes that instructors tell stories about in hushed tones.”

The tone is darkly comedic and in short chapters that include diagrams (definitely not PowerPoint), lists, scripts and even multiple choice. “Choice is an illusion” in training that creates a “person-thing” whose “foremost prerequisite to existence is that we lose not only our own humanity but remove that of our enemy as well.”

Young learns that “an improperly looped belt shows a lack of attention to detail, which will result in this person causing the deaths of Marines in combat.” If he repeats a task “it will become automatic, ingrained in the muscle forever.” And there are contradictions.

“We are told the Marines don’t see race,” that “we are green,” yet “in the fleet we call one another wetback and honky and twinkie and spade and fence jumper and porch monkey and cracker and gook and round eye.”

As brothers, Marines huddle together against winter winds, and “it’s not gay if it’s for body heat.” We “throw around faggot and queer and poke fun at the effeminate because we’ve learned to fear those intimate feelings, those intense moments of love that well inside us.”

This disruptive candidate for a commandant’s reading list spares no one, including the first-time author, whose military life is full of sweat and sweating. Alcohol and drinking. Masturbation and jerking off. Self-contempt and contempt for others. Brotherhood and estrangement — and their companions, guilt and indifference.

Those truths have residual consequences. Wherever a bullet goes “its true path of trajectory will pass directly into us, where it will ricochet off our bones and rip through our insides and smash into our consciousness … shredding for years.” The years make Marines for life — who opt, as the phrase goes, to eat the fruit and [expletive deleted] the Corps.

Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll, Penguin, 784 pages, $35.

The author of “Ghost Wars,” the 2005 Pulitzer winner about the CIA and Pakistan’s version of the agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, returns with a follow-up that he says “can easily be read independently.”

He’s right. Despite a forgettable title, the story sticks with you — a journalistically rewarding account that is dense but worth devouring.

He documents the mistakes — or, to be diplomatic, the miscommunications — between the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and the White House during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

The never-ending examples dismay and disturb, from “blame shifting between the CIA and the FBI” and “remarkable diplomatic incompetence” to every stakeholder’s inability to train, while feeding, the elephant in the room: Pakistan.

Afghanistan’s neighbor is the nuclear-holding nation that backs “the Taliban, Kashmiri guerrillas, and other violent Islamic radicals.” ISI is “an institution well practiced at manipulating the CIA and the Taliban simultaneously” and “agreeable to operate with the Americans against Al Qaeda” while supporting “indigenous jihadi clients” — partially with U.S. money.

“Judging by their invoices [to Central Command], they were expending ammunition at a rate that exceeded that of American combat units in Afghanistan.” A U.S. colonel explains the “mechanics of this war” to a State Department adviser. “You walk through a valley until you get into a firefight and then you keep shooting until it stops.” That’s a little troubling, the official replies.

Indeed. Coll determines that the U.S. has “no coherent geopolitical vision when it counterattacked Afghanistan after September 11, other than perhaps to try to avoid destabilizing Pakistan, a goal it failed to achieve.” The result is “the greatest strategic failure of the American war.”

The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen, Riverhead, 528 pages, $28.

The National Book Award nonfiction winner — a justifiable acclamation — is a cautionary must-read for service members and civilians trying to understand what is happening to another world power whose influence infiltrates the internet and inner circles.

“Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself,” writes the Russia-born staffer at The New Yorker, citing generations who lived their lives without feelings, affirmed with the 1917 revolution. Post-Soviet society seems to be falling back in line. One reason, says a political activist, is that “obedience and love for one’s leader are the traits of the Russian people.”

Gessen smartly focuses on four Russians who have survived the Perestroika movement and the last 18 years of Vladimir Putin’s reign. Their protests contrast with the plight of fellow citizens who are so frustrated by isolation and sanctions they are willing to forego freedom for an idealistic, World War II-type patriotism — and for widespread paranoia. To them, their perennial president represents the promise of stability in a world in which Russia comes first.

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine, PublicAffairs, 384 pages, $28.

The future is hijacked, thanks to generals, Google and the government.

“The Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today,” claims this fascinating study of Potomac fervor from Vietnam to Silicon Valley. “American military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.”

Purportedly privacy-conscious, conscientious corporations including Facebook, Amazon, and eBay “track and profile their users while pursuing partnerships and business relationships with major U.S. military and intelligence agencies.”

What does this mean? Uncle Sam watches you.

OK, Levine’s premise might seem like a conspiracy theory. But the internet, supposedly a “one-way ticket to global utopia,” instead transforms — “after two decades of lavish funding and research and development inside the Pentagon system” — into a consumer profit center, one that allows the U.S. “to get the drop on its enemies, both at home and abroad.”

Eighty pages of footnotes document his case.

“The biggest lesson of [Edward] Snowden’s NSA cache was that nothing happened on the Internet without passing through some kind of U.S. government bug.”

Sleep tight, and don’t let the byte bugs bite.

War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the 21st Century by David Patrikarakos, Basic, 320 pages, $30.

The future is histrionic, and “social media has irretrievably changed the way wars are fought, reported on, and consumed.”

The journalist’s point about fighting is his least persuasive in interviews mostly with civilians in Gaza, Ukraine, Russia (one works for a troll farm) and elsewhere about the increasing reliance on digital discourse for breaking news and opinions.

But even if his “reshaping” theory is not entirely convincing you will likely agree that “homo digitalis” — anybody with a keyboard — is affecting how people, democrats and demagogues, communicate about conflict.

There’s the Islamic State’s “virtual caliphate,” whose “amplification and global dissemination” of what “the Technicolor terror group” deems success is “just as important as the victories themselves.”

Such devious digital politics can produce manipulative, mandatory messaging. Russia’s “true totalitarian” Vladimir Putin is a “master practitioner.” The election of Commander in Chief Donald Trump, “whose tweets had the ability to dominate a news cycle, could not have happened in a pre-social-media age” whose platforms “reward repetition, redundancy and … verbal conflict.”

The “information environment is sick.” In a bravado new world that gives power to the people, “facts are less important than narratives.”

Radical Inclusion: What the Post-9/11 World Should Have Taught Us About Leadership by retired Army Gen. Martin Dempsey and Ori Brafman, Missionday, 192 pages, $27.

The future is fixable — if leaders are willing to share power.

That’s optimism from a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and a vegan (gasp) Berkeley (gasp) professor who combine forces as “the general and the guru.” They tell skeptics that inclusion “should not be dismissed as just another ‘feel good’ movement.”

The message? In a digital life in which “the sense of true belonging seems to erode around us, we as leaders must create real and authentic ways for our subordinates to feel that they are a part of something meaningful.”

How? Through “participation, personalization and purpose.” By providing a sense of belonging. Showing that “contributions matter.” Using imaginations. Encouraging action. Redefining power and control. Listening, amplifying and embracing.

Some might note that Dempsey’s own Mission Command White Paper 2012 (PDF) officially concurs: “Tell your subordinates what you want accomplished, and loosen control to allow them to develop strategies to achieve the desired outcome.”

The easy-to-read, how-to advice includes examples, many from the soldier’s “45 years in uniform,” and encourages managers to respect employees, military or civilian. “By advancing the cause of the group, we advance our own narrative.”

Those who think the ideas are radical will benefit most from reading the book.

Above & Beyond: John F. Kennedy and America’s Most Dangerous Cold War Spy Mission by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias, PublicAffairs, 352 pages, $28.

The pair who wrote “The Finest Hours” (made into a movie) about the Coast Guard’s rescuing of crew members of a broken tanker in a 1952 nor’easter present a you-are-there retelling of the Cold War’s scariest hours that’s due out April 17.

The book about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 opens slowly, with personal stories about pilots Rudolph Anderson and Charles Maultsby and Navy Lt. John F. Kennedy. Later two of the men fly U-2 spy planes, and one becomes commander in chief. The three war heroes have big roles trying to prevent another war — with nuclear bombs on both sides — stemming from Soviet-American friction over Cuba.

Neither Kennedy or Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev wants to push the button first. Each knows how the action will affect more than two nations. The back-and-forth conversations between them and among the National Security Council’s male-only committee — including Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay’s “bloodthirsty blustering” — are exciting play-by-play.

The pain-bedeviled president remains calm, and “we are all lucky that someone as levelheaded as (Kennedy) occupied the White House.”

The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers edited by Brian Turner, Norton, 256 pages, $26.

Army veteran, poet and memoirist (the superb “My Life as a Foreign Country”) Turner enlists four dozen writers, and many of his lip-service members might arouse both your intellect and your imagination. To the contributors, a kiss isn’t just a kiss.

Essayists include veterans Benjamin Busch (“Dust to Dust”), Brian Castner (“The Long Walk”) and Christopher Paul Wolfe, plus airman Matthew Komatsu, military spouse Siobhan Fallon and “Sparta” novelist Roxana Robinson.

Not all the kissettes are lasting, and they cover the sublime and the sad, the respectful and the romantic, the personal and the pop cultural. The “Sexiest Kiss” for novelist Téa Obreht is between Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeline Stowe in “The Last of the Mohicans” — although “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Piano” come close.

Tell: Love, Defiance, and the Military Trial at the Tipping Point for Gay Rights by Maj. Margaret Witt with Tim Connor, ForeEdge, 288 pages, $28.

The trial gets third billing in the subtitle, but Air Force flight nurse Witt and “contributor” smartly devote half the space to the tension around her court case, which was pivotal and persuasive in the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law.

Told in third person, “Tell” is part history and part memoir, straddling duty and the dilemma of being in the closet to her colleagues and even her parents — “the intimate dimensions of it that she had to wake up to every day.” The woman whose service the Air Force features in recruiting campaigns becomes the woman the Air Forces discharges for committing “homosexual acts.”

The book also notes the testimony of the late Darren Manzella, the soldier whose coming out in Iraq helped put a face on the law that legally discriminated against gay service members from 1993 through 2011.

Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State by Carter Malkasian, Oxford, 280 pages, $28.

In “War Comes to Garmser” (2013) the former State Department advisor to Marines in Afghanistan proves he knows the nation of tribes as well as anybody else. With this comparatively short study of Iraq — where the author served similarly in 2004-2006 — he presents a fact-filled assessment and history of how things go wrong.

What was coalition success in Anbar province evolves into an Islamic State win because of the Iraqi government’s disenfranchisement of Sunnis, tribal leaders’ inability to remain cohesive and ISIS’ “roots and appeal” to a “critical mass” of Sunnis.

Why should anybody care now? Because of “the toil and sacrifice of our Marines and soldiers,” including “model” efforts by officers Sean MacFarland, William Jurney and now-Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller (“the definition of gruff”) and others.

The United States’ “fleeting moment” of victory “should give an general, secretary of defense, senator, or commander-in-chief pause.”

Journey: Memoirs of an Air Force Chief of Staff by retired Air Force Gen. Norty Schwartz and Suzie Schwartz with Ronald Levinson, Skyhorse, 396 pages, $28.

This is a personal history from a man who says he “is not the most engaging person,” his “account of my term” as a wartime leader — plus “original insights” and common ones about leadership.

“It’s the old adage that hard work pays big dividends,” says one, which grammatically needs no “old.” Another advises to “never let your guard down, and expect the unexpected.”

Predictably, 39 years on active duty is a lot to put into one book, but more perspective would help immensely. His instructions to Air Force “leaders at all levels” that they “must avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs” is “still being debated today” — but in the book drops out of the blue in 2012. What prompts the Jewish officer’s decree? The general doesn’t say.

He covers his highs and lows. Drones permit “more proportionate application of lethal force than any other comparable weapon system.” His idea for a “distinguished warfare” medal for controllers of remotely piloted aircraft is approved then abandoned, and the 2010 Inspector General report about mistakes involving body parts at Dover Mortuary is “the low point of my entire career.”

He refers to “my two mistresses,” his military mission and his wife. Suzie has “a dedicated chapter of her own” and often energetically corrects, in italics, her husband’s recollections.

Lest We Forget: The Great War: World War I Prints from the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, Pritzker, 400 pages, $60.

Lest he be confused, your reviewer perused the pages of this coffee-table investment to determine whether the handsome volume is an art book (as the “prints” in the title denotes) or a history that happens to be illustrated with posters.

It’s hard to tell. There are 166 colorful posters and 20 full-page maps that are supplemented with black-and-white photographs including the one on the front jacket — an odd cover-art choice for a collection of vibrant images from the era when “the poster was at the apogee of its power.”

As narrative, the routine chronology rarely connects directly with art. As art, “Lest” relies on osmosis for context. Artists are identified but the works’ genesis or dimensions are not. Maps, bluntly cropped, offer vague captions without dates. Apparently you’re supposed to take the posters at face value. The publication that wants “to be America’s centennial book on World War I” unfortunately lacks the muster you expect from a museum “in partnership” with the U.S. World War I Commission. Due April 11.

“Half of net proceeds” will go to the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C., from the book due out April 11.

The “Lest We Forget” exhibit in Chicago runs through March 2019. It’s not the only one of its kind:

• The National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City hosts “Images of the Great War” through May 13 and John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece “Gassed” through June 3.
• The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., hosts “Artist Soldiers,” which includes original works, through Nov. 11.
  
• The Library of Congress in Washington has “Echoes of the Great War” through January.
  
• “World War I and the Visual Arts” as well as “World War I and American Art” have closed in New York and Philadelphia, respectively, but catalogs of both exhibits are available.
  

Echo in Ramadi: The Firsthand Story of U.S. Marines in Iraq’s Deadliest City by Scott A. Huesing, Regnery, 256 pages, $30.

The former major writes unabashedly about his Corps, “the most hardcore branch of warriors in the world,” and his men, whose mission is “to kill or capture the enemy” in Ramadi and Rutbah in 2006 and 2007.

“You will kill,” he tells Echo company (2nd Battalion, 4th Marines), “and when this is all over it will be my responsibility. It will be my burden to carry because I am ordering you to do it.” He almost makes you believe guilt is transferable.

But Marines are more than just “the most lethal weapons on the battlefield,” and he learns that they need a break from battle to fulfill “the need to be human if just for a short amount of time.”

His memoir — “a” firsthand take on Ramadi, not “the” — fervently describes combat friction, a favorite term, but is notably effective when he writes about connecting. After he loses his first Marine, the 36-year-old opts out of a “canned letter of condolence.” He telephones the corporal’s parents in Maine and endures “that uncontrollable terror of having to tell the truth.”

The author is executive director of Save the Brave, which receives “a portion of the proceeds.”

Full Battle Rattle: My Story as the Longest-Serving Special Forces A-Team Soldier in American History by Changiz Lahidji and Ralph Pezzullo, St. Martin’s, 304 pages, $27.

He leaves Iran at age 23 and becomes the first Muslim Green Beret — and probably the first to be taunted by fellow soldiers for being a “raghead.” He persists, and his perspective could be insightful to Americans, including the commander in chief, concerned about immigration:

“There are more similarities between individuals in Santa Clara, California, Islamabad, Pakistan, and Tehran, Iran, than there are differences.”

He knows geography, having served in Lebanon, Haiti, Grenada, Somalia on the “Black Hawk Down” day, Iraq and Afghanistan, where he spots Osama bin Laden in 2003. (Nobody at the Embassy in Kabul cares.) The “longest-serving” has a lot to cover, in boots and by parachute: “I love jumping from airplanes almost as much as sex.”

Despite references to partying (“a great time was had by all!”) the book is about soldiering. The memoirist and his co-author provide a timeline in narrative form that has breadth but not depth.

Glenn Miller: Declassified by Dennis M. Spragg, Potomac, 408 pages, $35.

The superstar trombonist and bandleader volunteers to be “with the men doing the fighting” in Europe. The Navy rejects him, but the Army Air Corps offers a commission in 1942.

In London, his orchestra fights red tape and records 528 radio broadcasts for the boys. He turns down an opportunity to head the entire Army Band because “they don’t play our kind of music” — jazz.

Sadly “on the wrong day on the wrong aircraft” in 1944 he heads to Paris, and somewhere over the English Channel a “weather-related mechanical failure caused by human error” kills him, the pilot and the senior officer.

The book respectfully puts the nuts and bolts and carburetors and military abbreviations and regulations and orchestras in order — without the emotion Miller’s music is known for.

Home of the Brave: A Small Town, Its Veterans and the Community They Build Together by Donna Bryson, Chronos, 242 pages, $23.

The former Associated Press journalist interviews residents about the successes of the nonprofit Welcome Home Montrose, which tries to help veterans feel at home in a southwest Colorado town of 19,000. “Montrose had the audacity to look for solutions by taking on yet another conundrum: Can those on the sideline of an enormous conflict find a way beyond saying ‘thank you for your service’ to support America’s warriors?”

The answer? Yes.

With the feel of an expanded newspaper feature story, the book includes the voices of civilian founder Melanie Kline, other townspeople and veterans including a 93-year-old World War II Marine whose grandson, an Army medic, dies in Iraq.

“You have to get on with life,” he says.

Love and Sacrifice: A World War Brings Double Tragedy to an American Family by Dennis Whitehead, MMIMedia, 334 pages, $18.

On Aug. 13, 1944, a telegram brings news that Army Lt. Ollie “Bud” Reed Jr. was killed in action in Italy. An hour later there’s another knock at the door. His father, Army Col. Ollie Reed, was killed in France.

The well-meaning record is a military and personal survey of the Reeds of Kansas, largely through the words of mother and wife Mildred Boddy Reed, and minutely through stamp-sized family photographs.

NOTED, NOT REVIEWED

Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage by Brian Castner, Doubleday, 352 pages, $29.

The Iraq veteran, author of “The Long Walk” and “All the Ways We Kill and Die” and co-editor of “The Road Ahead,” retraces, via canoe, 18th-century explorer Alexander Mackenzie’s path.

The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes by Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone and Jeffrey E. Stern, PublicAffairs, 256 pages, $16.

The trade paperback edition of the 2016 book coincided with the release of the movie in which three of the four authors play themselves. It must be a weird experience.

The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s by William L. Hitchcock, Simon & Schuster, 672 pages, $35. (Out March 20)

How the supreme allied commander and Army chief of staff handled being commander in chief, a “distinctive model of presidential leadership that Americans — now more than ever — ought to study.”

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot, Norton, 768 pages, $35.

The CIA operative and former Army and Air Force officer symbolizes “the war’s many missed opportunities,” says historian Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The General Who Wore Six Stars: The Inside Story of John C.H. Lee by Hank H. Cox, Potomac, 280 pages, $33.

A reassessment of the officer whose “strategical genius” has been “underappreciated not only by his contemporaries but also by World War II historians.”

The 10 Biggest Civil War Blunders by Edward H. Bonekemper III, Regnery, 352 pages, $30.

The late historian’s tally is Union 6, Confederacy 4. Despite those numbers you know who comes out ahead.

What is Military History? by Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic, Polity, 188 pages, $20.

“Military history moves slowly at times, but it does move.” The third edition adds material about gender and naval history, and the “roadmap to the field of military history is now also a sailing chart.”

Morning Star, Midnight Sun: The Early Guadalcanal-Solomons Campaign of World War II — August-October 1942 by Jeffrey R. Cox, Osprey, 448 pages, $35.

The latest from the author of the similarly titled “Rising Sun, Falling Skies: The Disastrous Java Sea Campaign of World War II.”

The Tuskegee Airmen Chronology: A Detailed Timeline of the Red Tails and Other Black Pilots of World War II by Daniel L. Haulman, NewSouth, 198 pages, $26.

Nearly day by day: Fighter pilots were flying missions in 1944 and 1945 while cadets and bomber squadrons were training not just in Alabama, but in Michigan, Kentucky and Indiana.

Behind the Lawrence Legend: The Forgotten Few Who Shaped the Arab Revolt by Philip Walker, Oxford, 420 pages, $35. (Out April 7)

A historian invites readers to remember Col. Cyril Wilson, Lt. Lionel Gray and other Brits without whom “there would have been no ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ ”

The reviews, in order of reading value and satisfaction. Prices are provided by the publishers; you may find better deals online or in your local bookstore.

Click here for our spring nonfiction reviews.

Bring Out the Dog: Stories by Will Mackin, Random House, 192 pages, $27.

The short book of short stories launches the Navy veteran (23 years) into the pantheon-in-progress of outstanding literary fiction coming out of today’s wars.

Two of the 11 pieces appeared first in The New Yorker —an indication of their high quality. All take place in the dystopia of hard-working, dirty dogs of war, “et cetera” (a favored word). And all are set where “the reigning world champions of speed and violence” train in Utah and North Carolina, or fight in Iraq or in Afghanistan, in the crevices of mountains and warriors’ brains.

All of that means if you require easy resolution in your fiction, you might be more comfortable with a thriller (See below). Instead of O. Henry, think George “Lincoln in the Bardo” Saunders, with whom the author studied.

The canine in the title is a Belgian Malinois whose memorial service occurs in the dark, when “night vision had afforded certain advantages” including the ability to see “ice crystals trailing off the drone’s wingtips.”

In “Rib Night” at the dining facility, an operator sees “seahorse tails spinning clockwise” in a buddy’s eyes, and “time machine” pills feel “like money in the bank.” There’s a brawl, justified of course, over a carton of milk, and the story is a must-read.

Indian Country by John T. Young, IngramElliott, 246 pages, $15.

In this thriller that deftly meets the genre’s formula and also quotes Oscar Wilde and Flannery O’Connor, an Indian reservation is a scene of action and a source of solace.

Hero Jack Kincaid, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran on an FBI gig, identifies and wants to expel the bad guys: Mexican drug dealers, Pakistani jihadists, and Americans who claim “we don’t need the [expletive] government telling us what to do” while they accept al-Qaida and cartel cash.

Al-Qaida imports heroin to the U.S. because “the more America has to spend money and resources on its addicts, the weaker it becomes. And American dollars can be used to buy more weapons” — for the destruction of the U.S.

Only our hero and Native Americans have redeeming qualities. “Since Vietnam,” says the author and Army veteran of that war, “soldiers have regarded any combat zone as Indian Country,” a reference to Army’s 19th-century fights against Indians. In his novel’s sovereign nation, a Navajo Marine veteran of Vietnam exorcises spiritual demons — even Kincaid’s.

The Terminal List: A Thriller by Jack Carr, Simon and Schuster, 416 pages, $27.

With a pseudonym and a co-author (who receives two unbilled nods) and 10 pages of acknowledgments to everyone from the National Rifle Association to the Next Gen Foundation, a former Navy SEAL produces a suspenseful first thriller.

“List” moves fast — and predictably. A dying team member “drifted off to Valhalla” when 28 Rangers and 36 SEALs in hero James Reece’s Afghanistan unit are killed in an ambush. Reece discovers the culprits and avenges the despicable American higher-ups.

One has “liberal political leanings under a far-left Democrat president,” and another uses “the Pentagon like the world’s biggest ATM machine.” (Without the redundant “machine,” the line is a good one.)

“Your reputation was your currency” in special operations, and Reece strikes gold. He also strikes whomever he puts on his checklist of traitors, providing readers with blood and, literally, guts.

Reece’s pieces of violence unveil an undercurrent of politics. The preface warns of “revisionist views of the Constitution by opportunist politicians and unelected judges with agendas that reinterpret the Bill of Rights.” Any “consolidation of power at the federal level” must be “guarded against at all costs.”

The irony of Reece’s being a singular judge, jury and executor is the only thing that escapes him.

Battle Scars by David M. Salkin, Amazon, 120 pages, $7.

An airman is on the cover, but the story is about a Marine who walks a familiar path toward recovery after losing a leg and four friends in Afghanistan.

“The screenplay version,” says the author, “prompted the writing of this novella.” The occasionally touching “Thank You to America’s Warriors” has good intentions but feels like a training film.

Why? Because literary fiction by veterans continues to achieve mainstream recognition, and nonfiction becomes more inclusive.

Unsung women decipher enemy plans in “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.” The welcome and necessary anthology “It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan” gives a voice to females who fight for the right to fight.

This year, Military Times presented reviews of 60 books and considered reviewing dozens of others. “Considered” means we read portions of other books in order to determine whether a review would serve readers. Those books often are “noted but not reviewed.”

In two categories, here are the most memorable. Prices are suggested by the publishers; you may find lower figures online or in your nearest bookstore:

FICTION

Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman, Knopf, 256 pages, $26.

The second novel by the Marine veteran — his first, “Green on Blue,” made Military Times’ 2015 “top” list — affirms his stature. This story, a well-deserved finalist for the National Book Award, blends suspense with substance.

On the Turkey-Syria border, an Iraqi-born American interpreter from “a war against Iraqis” decides to support insurgents in Syria; it’s his way of finding atonement. His strained bedfellow, Daphne, also understands that “fighting doesn’t go on because of ideas. It goes on because of loss.”

Together they have nothing left to lose, and readers have everything to gain.

Spoils by Brian Van Reet, Boudreaux, 304 pages, $26.

In the veteran’s first book, Cassandra is a 19-year-old soldier without “the wariness that comes through the accumulated calamity of years.” And she is tough — “the most dangerous thing around,” even when she and two other soldiers become unintended spoils of war.

Like the Ackerman novel (above), “Spoils” has an ending that resonates.

War Porn by Roy Scranton, SoHo, 352 pages, $26.

The former soldier who wrote about our volatile globe in the nonfiction “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” (it made Military Times’ 2015 list) turns to fiction, and his debut novel is about soldiers and civilians trying to survive their own and the rest of the world’s volatility.

Particularly impressive is the short story that bookends the novel, about a backyard barbecue where tempers and passion fire up.

Brave Deeds by David Abrams, Black Cat, 256 pages, $16.

Five years after his superb first novel, “Fobbit,” Army veteran Abrams leaves the base, and satire, and goes AWOL.

His brave dudes, six characters in search of the memorial service for a beloved staff sergeant, unofficially procure a Humvee that breaks down in desolate, dangerous urban space. With nearly every step, the young soldiers stumble into trouble as they try to find their way out.

The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War edited by Adrian Bonenberger and Brian Castner, Pegasus, $25, 368 pages.

Overlook the cliché title and illustrations. Instead, savor each of the 24 distinctive tales by 24 veterans — most are white, five are women —in a collection that makes you want to read more writing by each contributor, including Ackerman (see above).

NONFICTION

Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden, Atlantic Monthly, 608 pages, $30.

The “Black Hawk Down” author tells what happens after Communist forces open the Tet Offensive and surprise everyone, everywhere.

U.S. soldiers and Marines fight back despite an oblivious brass that offers little moral or military support. Nearly 50 years later, their independent plight is regrettably similar to the headlines of today’s wars.

Crossings: A Doctor-Soldier’s Story by Jon Kerstetter, Crown, 352 pages, $27.

An emergency-room doctor joins the Army National Guard at 42. Why? War engages him.

During a third Iraq tour, the flight surgeon breaks. He finds himself on an operating table, and tests find a brain aneurysm. A stroke and post-traumatic stress follow.

Despite the debilitating diagnoses, the physician heals himself, eloquently.

The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid by Will Bardenwerper, Scribner, 272 pages, $26.

The author was an infantry officer in Iraq and has no “firsthand knowledge of the events,” but he makes you think otherwise as you go inside the minds of the prisoner and his protectors.

The despicable VIP detainee has a dose of dignity in this narrative of the last days of a dictator, and the MPs grow to appreciate “a former head of state showing them a respect they sometimes didn’t get from their own superior officers.”

Shooting Ghosts: A U.S. Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War by Thomas J. Brennan, USMC (ret.) and Finbarr O’Reilly, Viking, 352 pages, $27.

A Marine sergeant and a photojournalist walk into a war, and their shared memoir “about how our stories became entangled” is exceptional in candor — while describing the creative process.

Both struggle to regain the “cadence and hum of life”: O’Reilly goes from the trying ’Stan to the fire in Gaza, where he finally sees enough; Brennan, after earning a journalism degree, publishes The War Horse digital report.

The Jersey Brothers: A Missing Naval Officer in the Pacific and His Family’s Quest to Bring Him Home by Sally Mott Freeman, Simon & Schuster, 576 pages, $30.

This page-turner about three New Jersey sailors in World War II is, the publisher touts, “Unbroken” meets “Saving Private Ryan.” At first the claim seems preposterous, but it soon becomes fair.

Bill works in the White House’s map room, and Benny, also an Annapolis graduate, is on the aircraft carrier Enterprise.

Barton, the youngest, is in the Philippines when he is wounded in a Japanese attack. What follows are atrocities by the Japanese, arrogance from rival Army and Navy leaders, and anguish as a family begs for news.

The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War by Doug Stanton, Scribner, 336 pages, $30.

The author of 2009’s popular “Horse Soldiers” (about Special Forces in Afghanistan and soon to be a movie) wisely centers on Army Spc. John S. “Stan” Parker, who enlists after high school and can hardly wait “to become a paratrooper and go to war.”

He gets his wish, and Stanton gets a soldier who exemplifies service in Vietnam and then returns 46 years later to find “a kind of transformation, a transubstantiation, even.”

Grant by Ron Chernow, Penguin Press, 1,104 pages, $40.

The Pulitzer-winning author of what he accurately calls “lengthy sagas” produces another one — about the nation’s 18th commander-in-chief.

Bear with it, overlook the repetition, and you’ll find the book is a study of Grant’s loyalty and conscience. As president, the “master of the psychology of war” must “settle unfinished business from the war by preserving the Union and safeguarding the freed slaves.”

He perseveres despite a cigar, financial losses, and a notorious but over-touted reputation for binge drinking.

MORE MILITARY TIMES BOOK REVIEWS

• Winter Reading Guide: Nonfiction and Fiction
• Fall Reading Guide
• Summer Reading Guide
• Spring Reading Guide

Our nonfiction reviews, in order of reading value and satisfaction (fiction lovers, head here). Prices are provided by the publishers; you may find better deals as the holidays approach.

Grant by Ron Chernow, Penguin Press, 1,104 pages, $40.

Acclaimed with prizes including the Pulitzer, the author dedicates his new biography “to my loyal readers, who have soldiered on through my lengthy sagas.” This one, about the nation’s 18th commander in chief, falls in place.

With only 95 fewer pages than the Library of America edition of Grant’s own, originally two-volume “Personal Memoirs,” “Grant” weighs more than 4 pounds. Finishers merit a badge of courage labeled “read.”

Descriptions of secondary players (a cabinet member is “a tall, slim man with a balding pate, eyebrows that jutted over deep-set eyes, and a pencil-thin mustache”) are expendable. Given a first chapter called “Country Bumpkin,” subsequent reminders of Grant’s humble beginnings are tiresome.

And the frequent mentions of his proclivity for alcoholic binges could drive you to drink. The conclusion: In the end, “all available evidence suggests Grant had abstained from alcohol … through sheer willpower and perseverance — his stock in trade.”

But overall the book is worth its weight in bold evidence of Grant’s loyalty to a Union in which men are created equal. On the other side, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s action belies “the notion that Lee fought simply from loyalty” to Virginia and “betokens a more militant attachment to Confederate ideology.”

Under Chernow’s command, Grant is a leader with a conscience and “a soldier in his marrow.” In Mexico in 1846 he is “tranquil in warfare, as if temporarily anesthetized, preternaturally cool under fire” in his first fight. With a “visceral instinct for fighting” he becomes “a master of the psychology of war.”

Moving from general to president, he realizes “one big thing: His main mission was to settle unfinished business from the war by preserving the Union and safeguarding the freed slaves.”

Neither task is easy. There is a “broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort” including terrorism against black people, and the novice president who is “accustomed to the automatic obedience of huge armies” must “brook the vagaries of petty politics and wayward personalities.”

Grant perseveres despite a constant cigar (“an ultimately fatal addiction”) and lifelong financial losses. He is gullible, a man who “could recognize evil in his enemies but not in those who posed as his friends.” The Brooklyn Bridge was finished two years before Grant died in 1885, and you wonder if anybody tried to sucker him into buying it.

His friends — not posers — include Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, who sends 63 roses when Grant reaches 63, and Mark Twain, who publishes the memoirs that preserve the Grant family’s fiscal status and the president’s reputation for brilliance.

Besides cementing Grant’s stature, the book is a reminder that Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” is the inspiration for Broadway’s box-office phenomenon, the musical “Hamilton.” Imagine “Make the U.S. Grant Again” on a marquee.

Our Year of War: Two Brothers, Vietnam, and a Nation Divided by Daniel P. Bolger, 336 pages, Da Capo, $28.

The Hagel brothers — the older, Chuck, later is a senator and then a secretary of defense — are the subjects but the war is collectively America’s, yours and mine and “ours,” in Vietnam or back home.

The book is an attempt “to explain the significance of the tumultuous events of the Vietnam War and 1960s America.” The author of “Why We Lost” in Afghanistan (he was there) fulfills his mission.

The two soldiers are Tom and Chuck, serving and suffering in the same platoon. One is for the war, one is against it, and both fight in it.

In one three-week period, the sons and grandsons of veterans of two world wars share four Purple Hearts. Their tour amounts to “a lifetime of combat: Tet, patrols, ambushes, roadrunner ops, calling in artillery, arranging medevacs, twice wounded.”

You could quibble occasionally. Does a reader need six pages about George Wallace’s presidential campaign? And picture this: At a press conference featuring Gen. William Westmoreland, camera bulbs are “brilliantly white,” “dazzling,” “intense”, “luminous,” “intense” again, and full of “vibrant luminosity.”

However, most of the time the siblings’ story, a part of the American fabric that Bolger weaves deftly, sucks you in. Savor this, for example:

“So there it was. A superpower at war, a half million men in country, the famous 9th Infantry Division charging hither and yon applying … patented ‘excruciating pressure’ to the enemy, and it came to this.

“Forty-odd smoked, scared infantrymen counted on a 19-year-old and a 20-year-old — both bloodied up, neither in the army an entire year yet — to get them to safety. The U.S. Army put itself in this mess.”

That is the assessment of a retired Army general whose experience — including Iraq — adds meaningful punch. Bolger’s is “an infantryman’s account of two infantry sergeants,” and “there’s a broader story told because there’s always more to war than fighting.”

The Pentagon’s Wars: The Military’s Undeclared War Against America’s Presidents by Mark Perry, Basic, 368 pages, $30.

Don’t be misled by the subtitle and begin to feel sorry for commanders in chief. They know how to fight, also.

Besides, most of the squabbles in this “narrative account of the politics of war” are among friends — or so they think — in the Defense Department. Nobody at the Pentagon needs to cross the Potomac to have a spat.

The historian’s 1989 “Four Stars” looks at senior commanders and their civilian counterparts from World War II through the Cold War, and this book takes readers through the end of Obama’s administration.

In one corner? The Joint Chiefs of Staff, which must count the beans even during wartime. In 2006, Iraq strategy “fed into JCS worries that the war was cutting into military readiness. Building and maintaining the military was in the JCS’ interest; fighting a war undermined that.”

The paragraph’s citation credits a “senior Joint Chief officer.” Another cites “a senior Pentagon official,” and another a “senior U.S. Marine Corps officer.” If only those footnote soldiers would give their names, especially the one who says then-Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis feels “he needed to parade his masculinity.”

Meow. Some readers will consider such a catfight as blasphemy.

Whatever the sources — many are on the record — the highly readable book is a DoD version of TV’s “Dynasty,” so full of dirt you want to drain the pentagonal swamp:

• “Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t the smartest guy in the room, he just thought he was.”
• Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s allies attack Gen. Eric Shinseki’s Iraq testimony. “Shinseki doesn’t know what he’s talking about, they said.”
  
• When CIA head George Tenet hears that Rumsfeld named L. Paul Bremer as chief envoy in Baghdad he turns to an assistant and says, “Who the f— is Jerry Bremer?”
  

The examples are fun — until you remember that the stakes are serious.

In 28 years “no single senior military officer of any service has ever told a president ‘no’ — or even ‘yes sir, but.’ Except for one: Colin Powell told Bill Clinton ‘no’ — and that was on the issue of gays in the military, hardly as momentous as sending men and women to their deaths.” (More than a few readers might tell Perry that the two points are not exclusive.)

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy, Hachette, 432 pages, $28.

Women who helped bring victory achieve visibility, at last, in this history.

Everybody knows about Rosie the Riveter, says the author, a former Washington Post reporter. But “far less well known is that more than 10,000 women traveled to Washington, D.C., to lend their minds and their hard-won educations to the war effort” — all at a time when “there was really only one job consistently available” to an educated female: schoolteacher.

And being recruited to work secretly for 12 hours a day was not a feather on a woman’s hat. “That women were considered better suited for code-breaking work … wasn’t a compliment.

“To the contrary. What this meant was that women were considered better equipped for boring work that required close attention to detail rather than leaps of genius.”

Yet some achieve recognition at the Army and Navy’s separate decoding shops, competitive “to a degree that would have been comic if it weren’t taking place in the middle of a war.” By 1945, 7,000 of the Army’s 8,000 code breakers are female, as are 4,000 of the Navy’s 5,000 in Washington. Their interpreting of messages from Germany and Japan makes a difference from Normandy to Midway Island.

“As the Japanese coped with their changing (Pacific) island situation, the ex-schoolteachers had to cope with Japanese cryptanalytic changes” to the tune of 30,000 messages each month — a thousand a day — in 1944. The author maps out military coding in minutia that can be tedious, but she compensates by wisely relying mostly on the personal stories of the “girls.”

At 96, Dot Braden is finally able to tell her family what she did during the war. Ann Caracristi, the “peerless secret-keeper in every way” who becomes a deputy director at the National Security Agency, is buried beside her “longtime companion” — who also came to the capital in 1943.

Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam by Gregory A. Daddis, Oxford, 320 pages, $30.

The history professor, author and West Point graduate challenges some of “the more popular preconceptions held on the American experience in Vietnam,” what he calls “a miscarried” war, a “costly military stalemate.” His is a worthwhile “new perspective for those looking back to history for wisdom in managing current and future conflicts.”

The Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran resists blatant comparisons of those two wars with Vietnam — although he suggests that in Iraq, Army Gen. George Casey “could conveniently play the role of William Westmoreland with David Petraeus performing as the new [Creighton] Abrams.”

Abrams has top billing, and his “signal accomplishment was to alter, if only temporarily and reluctantly, the U.S. military culture from one captivated by visions of traditional battlefield ‘victory’ to one accepting the obligations of a political alternative in Vietnam.”

Everybody’s vision is blurred. “In the eyes of many American soldiers, the South Vietnamese acted more like dim understudies than true partners.” And the South fails to supply “a political education that might have committed its soldiers ideologically to the Saigon government.”

By 1969, President Nixon “envisioned Vietnamization as a policy of withdrawal rather than a strategy for victory. In the end, “no amount of American military muscle … could resolve the fundamental issue of whether South Vietnam was a viable nation capable of effective governance.”

Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus by Ellen Moore, Duke, 280 pages, $26.

Born “on a U.S. military base to an Army captain father and a pacifist mother,” the author dedicates her study to veterans, including “those committed to ending war.”

Her dissertation is ethnologic, exploring how civilians and veterans interact on campus. She wants to “help people differentiate between support for veterans and support for the wars in which they fought.”

After three years’ immersion primarily at unidentified California schools — an “elite” university and a community college — and interviews with at least 50 student veterans, what does she learn?

• “Academic challenges are caused not by collegiate hostility toward the military but by multiple factors, including disjunctions between veterans’ military training and academic demands, and psychological trauma.” And many enroll “to make sense out of their psychologically disjointed experiences of war” … and to get a degree.
• Culture suggests veterans “should serve as venerated representatives of the current wars,” and those assumptions “form part of a growing militarized sense on campuses.”
  
• Programs “based on an ideology of military superiority” can further distance veterans from civilian classmates and can be “a forum for military valorization.”
  
• “When ‘veteran friendly’ automatically comes to mean ‘military friendly,’ critical examination of the wars will be suppressed, and some veterans will be excluded” from criticizing wars they fought.
  
• “Reflexive, mandated gratitude” — offering thanks for a veteran’s service — “absolves U.S. civilians from engaging in public debates about wars carried out on their behalf.”
  

8 Seconds of Courage: A Soldier’s Story from Immigrant to the Medal of Honor by Flo Groberg and Tom Sileo, Simon & Schuster, 208 pages, $25.

Eight seconds refers not to how long it takes to read the memoir — although it is an easy task and the third effort by co-author Sileo, who brought similar, stick-to-what-happened, serviceable approaches to “Brothers Forever” and “Fire in My Eyes.”

Instead, the measure is the time Groberg takes — on his first day as a captain — to confront a suicide bomber. His effort saves other soldiers’ lives, although the Medal of Honor recipient wishes he had done more, and his last day in Afghanistan is a prelude to recovery that includes 32 surgeries.

The book illustrates how a French immigrant (his mother is Algerian) is full of American blood, and how a guy — whose first sentence admits his thinking about quitting Ranger School during the mountain phase — ends up doing the right thing.

An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice by Khizr Khan, Random House, 288 pages, $27.

Showing a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution was a Pakistan-born lawyer’s last-minute amendment to his two-minute speech at last year’s Democratic National Convention.

The moment put Khan, the son of a farmer, and his wife, a descendant of Afghanistan royalty, on the political map for his rhetorically asking GOP candidate Donald Trump whether he had read the Constitution.

The book is as plain and simple as Khan’s address and chronicles his leaving Pakistan for Dubai and eventually the U.S. To save money so he can send for family, Khan eats bread from a dumpster and sleeps in parks. But “I never felt that we were giving anything up.” Instead “I focused on what we were gaining” as citizens.

However, his Army captain son Humayun’s death in Iraq brings an “immutable and eternal void.” Yet “we can only be grateful for the 27 years we had with him.”

The book is more about dad than son, but the soldier’s selflessness, even as a teenager, is touching — and represents American ideals worth emulating.

Proceeds from sales of the book go to the Capt. Humayun S. Khan Memorial Scholarship at the University of Virginia.

Craig & Fred: A Marine, A Stray Dog, and How They Rescued Each Other by Craig Grossi, Morrow, 288 pages, $26.

A Marine’s best friend, or close to it, is his dog. In this memoir, a sergeant and a stray befriend each other in Afghanistan.

The feel-good story, told with an acknowledged co-author (Kelly Shetron), alternates between deployment and a cross-country trip with a Marine buddy and, of course, Fred — the word Grossi mistakenly hears when another Marine refers to the mutt as “friend.”

Having a pet is outside regulations, but Fred provides an “escape from the combat zone we were in,” and he finds fraternity. Shipping a dog home is also a no-no — “I knew it wasn’t right” — but supportive shippers and forged signatures expedite the egress.

Stateside, Fred’s behavior shows the wounded Grossi that “it’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s about how you make meaning out of those experiences,” and that’s the tale of this dog.

The experience is also available in a young reader’s edition ($17).

Silent Witness: The Civil Through Photography and Its Photographers by Ron Field, Osprey, 328 pages, $35.

Handsomely reproduced portraits in ornate frames dominate the selection by a Military Images magazine editor who taps his personal archive for photographs that make the book stand out.

The focus is on the men behind the camera, but the impact is in the faces of the mostly young soldiers who are most of the subjects. Except for references to the Smithsonian “Institute,” the coffee-table book is presented with care and class.

The Gun Club: USS Duncan at Cape Esperance by Robert Fowler, Winthrop & Fish, 366 pages, $16.

He never met his father, Navy Lt. Robert L. Fowler, a newlywed Harvard rower who died when torpedoes sank the destroyer Duncan during a 39-minute battle with the Japanese navy off the Solomon Islands.

But the author’s use of ships’ logs and his interviews with survivors produce an hour-by-hour, just-the-details report of what happens to the sailors aboard the destroyer. Sadly, in 1942 the Navy’s lack of recent fighting experience means its “ships, commanders and tactics were all found wanting.”

The executive officer treats his men like a ship of fools, and the captain’s after-action report is “a masterpiece of obfuscation.” In 1991, the author writes, “quite a few of the men told me that when they read Herman Wouk’s novel ‘The Caine Mutiny’ they thought it was about the Duncan.”

Long Way Out: A Young Woman’s Journey of Self-Discovery and How She Survived the Navy’s Modern Cruelty at Sea Scandal by Nicole Waybright with Jim Bastian, SpeakPeace, 552 pages, $18.

Internal bother is strong to seethe in this fastidious memoir about a square peg trying to fit into a porthole. In third person and with names changed, “Brenda” self-analyzes the psychology behind her not knowing “how to act” where “every move she made onboard felt foreign.”

When the destroyer Curtis Wilbur gets a new executive officer called Heather Astrid Gates — the acronym “HAG” — Brenda’s self-predicament gets no ballast from her bombastic boss (whose real name is thinly veiled).

Finally the lieutenant junior grade’s true calling comes to the surface when a shipmate offers her a belated but astute assessment: “I think that you’re a very bright young woman who seems extraordinarily unhappy aboard a ship and in the military.”

Duh.

Racing Back to Vietnam: A Journey in War and Peace by John Pendergrass, Hatherleigh, 256 pages, $15.

An Air Force flight surgeon occupies “the backseat of a workhorse fighter of the Vietnam War: the F-4 Phantom” and returns on a bicycle seat in a triathlon 44 years later.

He finds that “relatively few of today’s Vietnamese can actually remember the Americans” but “everyone has a family story about the war.” His travelogue follows that model with impressions that are more personal than profound.

Warrior Pups: True Stories of America’s K9 Heroes by Jeff Kamen with Leslie Stone-Kamen, Lyons, 184 pages, $14.

An airman is “a gentle soul with an easy smile and enormous love,” and that description typifies the rest of the happy humans and the language in this look-and-read book about people who work with Belgian Malinois military working dogs.

The canines have names, but people have only “real first names and last initials” because “a famed American anti-terrorist” advises the author to protect identities. Nevertheless, their faces are recognizable in dull photographs that unintentionally show why cat videos rule the Internet.

NOTED, NOT REVIEWED

• Endurance by Scott Kelly, Knopf, 400 pages, $30. The retired astronaut and Navy captain (just like his twin brother) presents the right stuff in his life, which includes a famous 340-day stint in space.
• My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness by Howard Jones, Oxford, 504 pages, $35. A history The New York Times Book Review says “is likely to become the standard reference work” about the killing of at least 300 villagers.
  
• The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us by Keith Lowe, St. Martin’s, 576 pages, $30. The British historian’s take on how the conflict changed everything including “the way we think about ourselves.”
  
• Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century by Hendrik Meijer, Chicago, 448 pages, $35. The uncle of General Hoyt S. Vandenberg (for whom the Air Force base is named) is a centrist Republican, and the biography shows how the senator builds bipartisan consensus ― now a rare concept.
  
• The West Point History of the American Revolution by the U.S. Military Academy, Simon & Schuster, $55. Full of illustrations including maps, this is the fourth coffee-table book in a pleasantly designed series that includes the Civil and World wars.
  
• The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon, William Morrow, 432 pages, $30. As the world fights in Europe, a U.S. munitions ship explodes in a Nova Scotia bay and kills 2,000.
  
• Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney, PublicAffairs, 352 pages, $28. As if war were not devastating enough, a pandemic infects “a third of the people on Earth” and kills at least 50 million.
  
• How We Won and Lost the War in Afghanistan: Two Years in the Pashtun Homeland by Douglas Grindle, Potomac, 280 pages, $30. The former war correspondent and field worker for the U.S. Agency for International Development describes how “our little group of Afghans, Americans, and Canadians tried to keep out the Taliban and bring hope to the poor farm families.”
  
• The Return on Leadership: A Three Step Plan to Navigate Change and Unlock Hidden Growth by D. L. Brouwer, FastPencil, 265 pages, $21. The former Navy flight officer offers examples to show why “growth isn’t just capital-intensive or labor intensive. It’s leader-intensive.”
  
• Soldier & Spouse and Their Traveling House by Matthew Alan House, Gatekeeper, 180 pages, $17. The newlywed Army officer wife use off-duty weekends to play tourist and to share their adventures in this travelogue.
  
• The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions by David Amerland, St. Martin’s, 416 pages, $28. The British journalist and speaker who interviewed “over 100 snipers” offers ways to apply their “complex fusion” of skills into your own “mental toughness.”
  

Nonfiction fans, head here.

The Battle Within by Alistair Luft, Inkshares, 350 pages, $16.

The debut novelist is a Canadian Army lieutenant colonel who opens with Tim O’Brien’s admonition that an “uplifting” war story is “a very old and terrible lie.” To tell the truth, Luft centers on Major Hugh Degare, a combat veteran (Afghanistan thrice) on desk duty at headquarters in Ottawa.

He suffers from post-traumatic stress, which he is reluctant to admit despite offers of help from his wife and a shrink. After all, “what kind of soldier couldn’t handle a few bad dreams?”

His dreams become vivid nightmares, and he feels like he can “no longer fit in to the very society he thought he’d been protecting.” His disengagement stems from pressures within and without. Another officer callously says “a soldier who’d kill themselves over a made-up reason like PTSD should never have been let into the military in the first place.”

What at the start seems like a fictionalized, Army-issued training treatise on coping with PTSD spirals into a suspenseful and sad situation that is uncannily close to daily news headlines.

Wolf Season by Helen Benedict, Bellevue, 320 pages, $17.

A sheep in wolf’s clothing and three illegally kept wolves populate a small, rural town that suffers the effects of a hurricane and an epidemic of post-traumatic stress.

Veteran and Army widow Rin is a “pit bull of a woman” who keeps an M16 above her kitchen window, suffers “a clusterbomb of paranoias,” and prances with wolves. Studio dancer Beth uses alcohol to stem her fear that her Marine husband will return from Afghanistan only to wear out her welcome mat. Physician Naema escapes from Baghdad to Syria to the U.S., but war follows her “all the way her to her bedroom in Huntsville, N.Y., and her very own bed.”

The doctor says people can use up their supply of compassion, and this is a town without much pity. As Rin says, “thank the Lord, Allah, Krishna, Buddha, and Santa Claus, too, that the Iraq War wasn’t fought in woods like these.”

The story is provocative if not always pleasant, with characters that require equal doses of empathy and endurance.

Into a Dark Frontier by John Mangan, Oceanview, 323 pages, $27.

In 74 short chapters, the Air Force pilot and “coffee house poet” debuts notably with a thriller about how an ex-Navy SEAL’s actions — plural — might save the world, starting with one continent.

When his government frames Slade (and his sister Summer), the only recourse is for him and his horse, Sig, to cooperate with an Army colonel who insists he covertly — how else in a thriller? — get to the bottom of the horror in a future, post-holocaust Africa.

Stir in an American religious sect (the Judeans), a murderous cult (the Penitents), our hero’s incredible prowess (mental and physical), and a beautiful woman (with “Indian-ink” hair) who is in danger and in Slade’s thoughts. Things happen fast and with occasional fun: “The worst thing about life is that there’s no theme music.”

A subtheme that is either naive or disingenuous will make some readers squirm, starting with the title’s archaic reference to Africa. There’s an anti-gay slur and “joke.” Empathy for people who depart the U.S. because “if we stood up for our biblical beliefs, we were accused of hate-speech.” And the threat of “One World Government” created by things such as international trade deals.

The ending implies Slade will be back, and perhaps then the plot — not the politics — will thicken.

NOTED, NOT REVIEWED

• Hunter Killer: The War with China — the Battle for the Central Pacific by David Poyer, St. Martin’s, 320 pages, $28. Admiral and hero Dan Lenson returns in the 17th thriller in the series by a retired Navy officer, and this time China, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea go up against the U.S. fleet.
• Curse of the Coloring Book: A Novel Inspired by a True Story by Howard L. Hibbard, Ghost Dog, 384 pages, $17. An attorney fights a legal malpractice suit while he treats his post-traumatic stress and combat flashbacks with alcohol — in a story by an Army veteran of Vietnam and a lawyer.