Patrol An American Soldier in Vietnam

by Tim O'Brien

O'Brien does something Myers does brilliantly—he collapses the distance between reader and soldier by making you feel the weight of both physical objects and emotional burdens. Where Myers uses verse and collage to create immediacy, O'Brien uses interconnected stories that blur truth and fiction, forcing you to sit with the same uncertainty and dread that soldiers experience in the field.

by Walter Dean Myers

I know—same author—but this is actually his full-length novel companion to Patrol, and it deepens everything that poem accomplishes. Where Patrol gives you a single moment of terror, Fallen Angels follows Richie Perry through his entire tour, letting you understand how young soldiers rationalize, survive, and change. It's the prose expansion of the emotional truth Myers captured in verse.

by Rose Kam

Published in 1929, this is the granddaddy of soldier-perspective war literature, and it shares Myers' unflinching focus on what combat actually does to a young man's mind and body. Remarque doesn't glorify or philosophize—he just shows you Paul Bäumer's fear, hunger, and the slow erosion of his humanity, which is exactly what Myers captures in that single patrol moment.

by John Connolly

This might seem like a left turn—it's a dark fantasy—but Connolly writes about a boy navigating a hostile, incomprehensible world where danger lurks everywhere and nothing is quite what it seems. That same sense of dislocation and threat that Myers creates in the Vietnamese jungle appears here in a magical landscape; both authors understand how to make a young person feel utterly alone and hunted.

by Joe Pluta

Klay's interconnected stories about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans capture something Myers understood about Vietnam—that the real war often happens after you leave the battlefield, in the gap between what civilians expect soldiers to be and what they've actually become. His prose is precise and devastating in the way Myers' verse is; both writers refuse to let readers look away from uncomfortable truths.