There will come a day, and it will be soon, upon which a great novel of the Iraq war will be published.

If you’re an American fighting there, the war in Iraq is a clearly foolish endeavor in which you've been sent to fight and possibly die for frivolously presented, very inscrutable reasons. Vietnam was like that, and that’s one of the reasons why so much good writing has come from that war. Moral quandaries abounded in those jungles, and the best of fiction is dependent for its life on such quandaries in the souls of its major characters. So, from Vietnam we have James Webb’s Fields of Fire and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried among many others, not to mention the amazing non-fiction books Dispatches by Michael Herr and Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire In The Lake.

Although their news conference styles were quite different, Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld were alike in their seeming inability as Secretaries of Defense to understand why they were wrong ... or even that they were wrong. So, young men and women are packed off to war in order to shore up the justifications these men have invented for waging it. It’s terrible for the soldiers, to be sure, and we would all prefer that they not have to do this. But the scenario is absolutely ripe for contemporary fiction. If you fancy heroes who are uncertain of their beliefs in the face of obdurate destruction, or who become heroic and self-sacrificing while defending a political folly, or are observers with a keen sense of right and wrong looking on as less-wise people imprison, and then murder, innocents ... if these kinds of heroes are interesting to you, Iraq is your war.

Of course, such heroes have appeared in books about wars that were very justified. Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is perhaps the most famous, a man with a pragmatic, yet comic disposition who realizes in World War II that his superior officers are the real enemy since they are the ones sending him into battle and therefore trying to get him killed. That’s the catch. Again and again he battles against them, and he loses again and again.

Henry Fleming, in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, runs away from battle at first, then becomes a fearsome soldier himself. The gray, self-questioning middle ground between his cowardice and his bravery is where the real novel takes place.