Where the differences came in was the patina of ideology which the news media laid over everything. There's certainly a bias, to some degree, in the way the media portrays the military. I'm not saying that's entirely wrong - the Fourth Estate is there to hold generals and colonels accountable for their actions and decisions - but having reporters on the scene, reporting in real time certainly complicates things for the military mission.

Wars always evolve over time, don't they? Iraq/Afghanistan is different than Vietnam, and Vietnam was different than Korea, and Korea was different than World War One, and so on. Some things remain the same, of course - one side fighting another over ideology or a patch of ground - but there are some aspects of combat life which differ radically than their predecessors.

The modern wars are also omnipresent in our electronic media - to be cynical about it, we now have 24 hours of non-stop bloodshed available to us. The internet and real-time media reporting were integrated into daily life in Iraq.

I think it's possible - perhaps even necessary - to find comedy in any war. I mean, look at the brilliant work which was done by Joseph Heller and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H) and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Svejk - which I haven't read, but have heard was funny).

It's disingenous for me to say that I wasn't trying to write a moral novel. By its very nature as a novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit steps into the political conversation. There's no way to avoid that. I can appreciate that readers are probably going to line up on one side of the novel or the other. I hope they go to those polar extremes, actually.

Where the differences came in was the patina of ideology which the news media laid over everything. There's certainly a bias, to some degree, in the way the media portrays the military. I'm not saying that's entirely wrong - the Fourth Estate is there to hold generals and colonels accountable for their actions and decisions - but having reporters on the scene, reporting in real time certainly complicates things for the military mission.

Seeing any war through the distortion of comedy is healthy. There is just too much absurdity and irony at play in a combat zone not to pay attention to it. At least that's how it struck me; others may have had an entirely different war experience.