4 Great War Stories

War, with all its adrenaline and terror, its quotidian and vainglorious detail, its sex and death, can be found in the four stories here. Ward Just, in an excerpt from his novel Forgetfulness, takes us to the Pyrenees, where centuries of war and, most recently, the attack on the World Trade Center, bring a cruel fate to an innocent resident of an obscure town. In a visionary excerpt from Jayne Anne Phillips’s new novel, Lark and Termite, an American infantryman finds himself caught between the civilian upheaval of the Korean War and his inner experience of the life and love he left behind; a chapter from E. L. Doctorow’s masterly novel The March brings Sherman’s invading army to the doorstep and into the rooms of a house where a dying judge’s daughter must fend as she can. Finally, Ken Kesey’s old Prankster pal and co-writer, Ken Babbs, who was a pilot in Vietnam, spins a hyper-real story of helicopter crews skimming over the jungle, craving action, and recklessly trolling for war souvenirs.