9 awesome war novels everyone should read

Every military professional has his or her favorite war novel and picking the "greatest" is a tall order. But that's what we do here at WATM. These are our picks for the greatest war novels ever written:

1. Catch 22

Written from several third person points of view with a circular dynamic centered around the paradox that is Catch-22, this Joseph Heller classic was in many ways years ahead of its time in that the wider audience didn't relate to his reading of the military until well into the Vietnam War years. Beyond the biting satire and staccato pacing Catch-22 captures the personalities that populate the military to this day: inept commanders, opportunistic junior officers, and enlisted men staying sane by not taking anything around them too seriously. This is a must-read before every major deployment.

2. The Things They Carried

Tim O' Brien's Vietnam-era literary masterpiece is brimming with pathos. The novel's strength isn't necessarily in how it deals with war straight-on, but it lies in O'Brien's atmospherics and states of mind and the resultant permanent scars of an ill-defined conflict carried out by a nation riven by it.

3. Mr. Midshipmen Hornblower

Most people think of Patrick 'O Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series as the definitive historical fiction works around the heyday of warfighting sailing ships, but Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, the first book in C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series, skips getting bogged down in technical detail and instead offers timeless lessons in military leadership at sea and amazing perspective around what 17-year olds had to tackle responsibility-wise in the fledgling American Navy.

4. The Hunters

James Salter's poetic prose elevates this Korean War-era story about Air Force pilots to timeless art as well as a definitive reading of those drawn to that particular warfare specialty.  The Hunters has it all: a burned out CO, a confused chain of command, cocky junior officers, and significant others complaining about being ignored for the glory of air combat.

5. The Hunt for Red October

Tom Clancy was an insurance salesman who couldn't interest anyone in his manuscript until the Naval Institute Press – a publisher that had never done fiction – decided to take a chance based on the story's level of technical detail that bordered on classified. The book's sales were relatively flat until President Ronald Reagan was seen carrying a copy, and from that point The Hunt for Red October became the title that launched a thousand technothrillers as well as Clancy's prolific and lucrative career.

6. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Author Ben Fountain paints an all-too-accurate portrait of what "support the troops" has come to mean a decade and a half after 9-11. "Halftime Walk" is set at the Dallas Cowboys stadium where an Army unit is feted by the team's owner and his circle of Texas fat cats who demonstrate the distance between the American population and those sent to do their fighting.  More than a novel about war, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a national indictment.

7. All Quiet on the Western Front

Remarque's groundbreaking World War I novel was among the first to dispel any laudable mystique surrounding war through its detail about trench warfare and mustard gas attacks and the portrayal of the protagonist's decent from idealistic recruit to member of a generation forever scarred by "The Long War." Paul Baumer's heartbreak is that of the hundreds of thousands of service members who followed him into battle in the decades after his war ended, many of whom certainly read the book but went anyway.

8. Redeployment

An instant classic. Phil Klay's much heralded debut novel about the Iraq War is worthy of the praise heaped upon it. Redeployment is at once timely and timeless in capturing the nuance of the emotions and states of mind of Marines at war and back home between tours. To get to what's honorable about service you have to face the realities of an unclear mission without end and what accepting them does to those involved. In this effort Klay emerges as the de facto spokesman for the post-9/11 cohort of warfighters.

9. Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut's best-known novel if not his masterwork, Slaughterhouse Five builds off of the author's real-life experiences as an eyewitness to the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing during World War II and adds a time-traveling protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, to create a book that deftly illustrates the pointlessness and futility of war. (Also recommended by Vonnegut: Mother Night.)

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