Hating the war, loving the war, hating himself for loving it. For Babchenko, war is like an abusive lover he can't let go of. It's a relationship, he argues, that can be fully understood only by those who have been in battle. "In war a person [becomes] some other kind of creature," he writes. "We don't have just five senses; there is a sixth, seventh, tenth even, growing from our bodies like tentacles and grafting themselves onto the war. And through them we feel the war. You can't talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or dimwitted, but because they don't have the senses to feel it with."

Unfortunately, there are half a million Americans and counting returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today who know exactly what he's talking about. *