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Empire of the Sun is a film about civilians caught in a war zone.
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, is a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. It shows the exhilaration, the terror, the cruelty and hardship of living through a war. It definitely doesn't glorify conflict.
My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd, is a firsthand account of the Bosnian conflict of the 90s. It is ugly and brutal, and the author tries to give an honest presentation of his own state of mind at the time.
Black Hawk Down (the book, not the movie), by Mark Bowden, is a fairly thorough account of the incident in Mogadishu in 1993. Bowden did a lot of research and describes the political background that led to the UN and US presence in Somalia, and all of the mistakes that led up to the helicopter being shot down and what happened after. He interviewed many of the military personnel who were actually involved and recounts the events from several different perspectives. And as the Wikipedia article says:
This is a very realistic presentation of what combat is like, framed inside the perspective of the overall military operation. Bowden doesn't shy away from describing the mistakes in decision-making, but also does a fair job of describing how lack of information or bad information leads to bad decisions in the moment which result in people dying for no good reason. He definitely doesn't glorify the conflict. My overall impression after reading it was "I hope I never have to be involved in anything like that".
And finally, Alice's Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie, is a song about the draft.
if you wanna end war'n'stuff ya gotta sing loud
The Things They Carried is so beautifully written. The story On the Rainy River, about a young man struggling with whether to avoid the draft, had this which has stuck with me:
If the stakes ever became high enough - if the evil were ever evil enough, if the good were good enough - I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comfortable theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.
Echoing Alice's Restaurant. It's funny too.
New bar trivia team name: The Group Dubya Bench