Volunteers: Growing Up in the Forever War

“A beautiful and powerfully affecting portrait of a boyhood in a military family.” —Phil Klay, author of Missionaries and the National Book Award-winning Redeployment

As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with real guns, join...