News of the United States' continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped on and off the front pages of newspapers as, so we're told, Americans' interest in those stories waxes and wanes. Today, jobs are more important; tomorrow, health care. Somewhere below the fold, or on page two, the stories of war show up.

Megan K. Stack spent years writing those stories for the Los Angeles Times. On Sept. 11, 2001, at the age of 25, while she was vacationing in Paris, she was sent to Afghanistan, "rushed into foreign reporting by coincidence" as "America ... crashed zealously into war and occupation." "Every Man in This Village is a Liar" is a collection of stories Stack did not send back to the L.A. Times, filled with personal details, anger, speculation and opinion, traits frowned upon in news reporting, which strives for objectivity and fact.

As the years and wars add up, Stack returns to places many civilians try desperately to get out of. At times she questions why she goes back to such places, ultimately coming to the same conclusion as another war correspondent, Chris Hedges, who has written simply, "War is a drug." "Adrenaline is the strongest drug," Stack writes. "This is why people get addicted. When adrenaline really gets going ... you feel like you can do anything. I know when this is over, it will be like dying."

"Every Man," like any story about war should be, is difficult to read at times. As when someone, after a bombing, holds up "a baby, purple and mottled, so tiny you can't tell whether it had been born yet when it died." The difficulty comes from the context only; Stack's prose is beautiful and poetic, as when she writes of her early days in Afghanistan: "thick light smearing over everything like honey. The jangle of tongues, tangle of smells, every human enterprise a cheap trifle of origami against this massive, unchanging earth."

In the end, after "six years of chasing war," Stack goes to Moscow "in large measure because [she] didn't expect to find any war there." She struggles to find meaning in the wars and the reporting, which is difficult because, she remembers, "it seemed to mean a great deal -- back when we all went into Afghanistan." But before Stack gives up on "pulling poetry out of war," she pulls enough to write a beautiful book about the ugliest things humans do to one another. Without stories like Stack's, war becomes impersonal and easy to gloss over, relegated to page two. These stories -- personal and vulnerable -- are meaningful, if for no other reason than they force us to look again.

David Doody is a founding editor of InDigest Magazine (indigestmag.com) and a bookseller at Common Good Books.