By Mukesh 
The real value of this odd little memoir is not his dissent, but that it offers us something more unique: the story of a staff officer who labors in a war he never witnesses. He knows almost nothing of it, and indeed never sees combat. He spends all but a few hours of his tour of duty in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the heavily protected district that sat in the middle of the Iraqi capital but was walled off from it. He goes, in part, because he is estranged from his wife back home, who apparently is happy to see him leave.
At times the book veers into satire. While American soldiers and their allies on the front lines were worried about staying alive amid roadside bombs, Mowle sought ways to improve his work-life balance, even joining an evening bridge game. He was also pleased when he managed to secure a place to live that was “closer to the gym and,” he writes, “on the same side of the Palace as the pool if I preferred to swim laps.” At the same time, he candidly admits, “Our lack of understanding of Iraqi culture, Arab culture and Islam was pathetic.”
Perhaps the oddest aspect of this tale is how it ends. Like an inverse Odysseus, almost the first thing Mowle did when he got home to Colorado was divorce his wife — because one thing he had learned in Iraq, he reports, is that “life was too short and too unpredictable to sit around and wish things would get better.”
The reality is that most people in war are bystanders who simply try to survive the conflict. That perspective, all too often neglected by scholars of war, comes through powerfully in MOLLIE BRUMLEY’S CIVIL WAR: Surviving the Guerrilla War in Arkansas (University of Oklahoma Press, 228 pp., $32.95), by the historian Theodore Catton.
For Brumley, an orphan living in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains as the Civil War raged across 1860s America, victory meant keeping herself and her loved ones alive, even if it also meant eating wild plants in the woods. On May 25, 1862, she kissed a boy she liked as he enlisted in the Confederate Army. His name was Valentine Williams. She was 14 years old. He was reported missing and presumed dead barely six months later, in the battle of Prairie Grove.