"In this ... memoir, award-winning poet Brian Turner retraces his war experience--pre-deployment to combat zone, homecoming to aftermath. Free of self-indulgence or self-glorification, his account combines recollection with the imagination's efforts to make reality comprehensible. Across time, he seeks parallels in the histories of others who have gone to war, especially his taciturn grandfather (World War II), father (Cold War), and uncle (Vietnam)....

In a Japanese prison camp on Java in 1942, two British officers, John Lawrence and Jack Celliers, encounter camp commander Yonoi and his sergeant Hara. Things had been going pretty well, until charismatic, rebellious Celliers arrived. Yonoi is a devotee of the samurai ideal; neither he nor Hara can understand the stoic way in which the British prisoners accept their situation of defeat. Lawrence speaks Japanese, and ceaselessly tries to mediate between...