Buy This Book. Now.

While home in Tennessee this weekend, I finished (and enjoyed) this book and this book. More on both later. But as soon as I started Matt Gallagher's new memoir, Kaboom, while waiting on my plane to depart from the airport in Chattanooga, I was hooked. This may well be the best memoir to have been written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Because it captures something I have never really seen captured all that well in memoirs -- how the constant suck of war is intertwined with the never-ended stream of hilarity that takes place in a tight-knit combat arms platoon. Kaboom is laugh-out-loud funny. And brutal. Buy it.