There are plenty of incredible military fiction novels out there, but some books and memoirs based on true stories of war are just as gripping as any bit of fiction. As Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman once said, "War is hell." The best books about war can be at times gripping and harrowing, heartbreaking and funny. Fiction takes that hell of war and reflects it back at the reader, but while the stories can be terribly hard to read, they are, in the end, still fiction.

When it's nonfiction, however, stories about war and battle become even more powerful. Books that come directly from the pens or lips of the women and men who lived through battle are incredible documents of history and humanity, of the depths of human valor and the folly of mankind. The nonfiction books and memoirs on this list are chosen for their variety, from books about World War II to the Civil War, and comprehensiveness, as well as how they have been generally received by readers and historians alike.

10 Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

James Bradley

In the early 1940s, nine American Marine and Navy pilots volunteered to fly daring raids over Japanese territory, their mission to shoot down Japanese communications towers on the Ogasawara Islands. During the mission, they were shot down over the Japanese island of Chichi-jima. Of the nine men who went into the water, only one was picked up by a U.S. submarine. That man, George H.W. Bush, later became the 41st President of the United States. As for his eight comrades, they were captured and endured horrific acts of torture and cannibalism by their captors until they were executed months later.

James Bradley's novel, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, painstakingly recreates the events of these eight lost men and the lone survivor through witness interviews, classified documents, and historical archives. Flyboys does not shy away from the brutality of the story, with Bradley taking an unflinching look at the history that led to the Japanese soldiers' inhumane treatment of American POWs and how American westward expansion played into it decades earlier. While the focus is on the young men who were shot down, it tells a broader story about two nations' histories that brought them to loggerheads during WWII.

9 Storm of Steel

Ernst Jünger

Most soldiers' memoirs tend to focus on the horrors of war and carry a strong thread of regret, even married with duty. German soldier Ernst Jünger's World War 1 memoir Storm of Steel, however, is one of the few in which the writer seems to have embraced every second of war. As a young German soldier, Jünger painstakingly documents his experience fighting in the trenches and watching his comrades fall while he survived British shelling and led daring raids. Through it all, his sense of purpose kept him zealously committed to his duty.

Storm of Steel is one of the more interesting war memoirs in that, despite how young he was at the time, Jünger was also incredibly self-aware – sometimes disturbingly so. To his mind, World War I was not just a global conflict, but also a war he must fight within himself to withstand the life-or-death scenarios in which he found himself. With every mission that ended in his survival, he became more determined to push himself to his limits, defying the death he was sure would come for him.

8 One Bullet Away: The Making Of A Marine Officer

Nathaniel Fick

The Marines are known as "the few, the proud," but not many civilians know there's an even more elite unit within the Marine Corps: the Recon Marines. About 10-20 people flunk out of Marines boot camp, and only 1 of every 100 Marine soldiers qualify to be part of a Recon force. Captain Nathan Fick was one of them, serving in the Marines’ First Recon Battalion with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He's responsible for the safety of 22 elite Marines under his command, and as they go into battle, he's determined to see every one of them home safely.

What sets One Bullet Away apart is that it underscores how Fick's rigorous training was only part of his success once he was shipped overseas to the field of battle. He also needed luck, common sense, and to know when his superiors were not seeing things clearly. It doesn't undermine the training, though. Fick takes readers through what it takes to be a Marine with his firsthand account, starting with his very first brutal summer at Quantico. The memoir details the elite, high-level training not just of the Marines, but also of the Recon force, which he joined four years into his career as a Marine, and of what they endured while deployed.

7 Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest

Stephen E. Ambrose

Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers may be one of the best-known true history war books ever written thanks to Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks' iconic 2001 miniseries adaptation. To write his book, Ambrose conducted interviews with the WWII veterans of E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. With their help and feedback, Ambrose said, "We have come as close to the true story of Easy Company as possible."

And what a story it is. Ambrose's novel is so poignant because it is a war book that doesn't focus on war. While it certainly incorporates the battles in which the men fought in the European Theater and the larger horrors of World War II, what makes Band of Brothers such an enduring read is that the main focus is on the men and their lives. Through his interviews and later his writing, Ambrose details each man of Easy Company with complexity and precision, capturing exactly who they were then. The result is arguably one of the greatest memorials to veterans ever penned.

6 The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II

Gregory A. Freeman

Many stories from World War II have endured to take on near-mythological status in American military lore: D-Day and the storming of Normandy, the Christmas ceasefire, the Tuskegee Airmen, and more. A lesser-known story is one of the most inventive and daring rescue missions of not just the Second World War, but arguably any war. When hundreds of American airmen were shot down in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, local Serbian peasants were determined to hide the soldiers in their homes, risking not just the soldiers' lives, but theirs and their families' should the Nazis catch them.

What follows is an incredible story detailed in Gregory A. Freeman's The Forgotten 500. In 1944, Operation Halyard was greenlit as a rescue operation to retrieve the 500 American soldiers. The mission: Fly cargo planes behind enemy lines to rescue the stranded, starving soldiers, without being shot down. The catch: The stranded soldiers had to construct runways for the cargo planes to land on, without any tools, without calling attention to the Nazis, and without putting the selfless villagers in danger. Until Freeman's book, the story was little known thanks to the documents about it being classified, so it's well worth a read to learn of the most daring operation no one knew about.

5 A Bright Shining Lie

Neil Sheehan

In 1962, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was assigned to Vietnam to be an advisor to the Saigon regime of South Vietnam and guide them in military strategy and tactics. What followed, before the United States even officially entered the war, was a corrupt and shambolic effort by the regime and an inflexible, incompetent U.S. strategy that left Vann frustrated and furious. Upon his return to Vietnam in 1965, this time to lead men into battle, Vann's attempts to fix a broken military strategy were eventually ground down by the futility of the U.S. effort in the jungles of Vietnam.

Generations removed from the Vietnam War, it's easy to see now what a shortsighted disaster it was. While plenty of people protested the war back then, what none of them seemed to realize was that the soldiers stuck in hell halfway across the world also knew how futile it was. Neil Sheehan pulls no punches in A Bright Shining Lie. It's a sprawling account of the foolishness of the Vietnam War from the start, and how the U.S.'s arrogance and ignorance got plenty of good men killed in a war that couldn't be won. It's a sobering, warts-and-all lesson about the dangers of ignoring humility and reason in war.

4 A Vietcong Memoir

Truong Nhu Tang

On the flip side of Sheehan's account of Vann's perspective is one from the perspective of a Viet Cong guerrilla fighter. As a young college student living in Paris, Truong Nhu Tang once met Ho Chi Minh, the legendary North Vietnamese communist revolutionary and President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for almost 25 years. That meeting inspired Tang to join the Viet Cong as a soldier to fight for his country, eventually rising to the elite rank of Minister of Justice, where he became a key figure in the fight to liberate their way of life.

What's fascinating, however, is that, just like Vann on the opposing side, Tang soon grew disillusioned with the Vietnam War. As he witnessed the brutality of the long, drawn-out conflict that had turned into a no-winner war of attrition, he became increasingly embittered about the cause he had once championed. By the end of the war, he had fled back to Paris, where he lived in exile. A Vietcong Memoir offers an important perspective on the Vietnam War and is the most complementary bookend to A Bright Shining Lie.

3 War

Sebastian Junger

Much like the Vietnam War, the War in Afghanistan is now widely understood to have been an utter failure, a 20-year fight U.S. troops and its allies could never win. The men and women who fought came back changed and often broken, frustrated by the futility of the conflict and of the unpredictability of the guerrilla tactics of the fighters they faced. Sebastian Junger was there for most of it, embedded in Afghanistan as a war correspondent while covering the war for over a decade. Much of his time was spent embedded with the U.S. Army 173rd Airborne.

Junger took the material he'd collected from his time with the 173rd and turned it into the novel War. The novel follows the intimate bonds forged between the soldiers stationed in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. Their commitment to each other, and the valor and bravery with which the platoon fought over the 15 months the book covers is an intimate look not just at modern combat, but also at the brotherhood that forms between soldiers during war. Junger's time with the 173rd also was the basis of the Academy Award-winning documentary Restrepo, which serves as an excellent companion to War.

2 A Blaze of Glory

Jeff Shaara

It was Spring 1962 and the Confederate Army fighting in the Western Theater of the Civil War was on the verge of total collapse. General Albert Sidney Johnston was desperate to turn the tide, hatching a bold plan to take the fight to the Union Army in a surprise attack before it could be resupplied and reinforced with more troops. For one day, Johnston's audacious plan seemed to be paying off as the Confederates gained the upper hand. The tide turned the next day when Ulysses S. Grant's army was reinforced faster than Johnston anticipated. The events became known as the Battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War.

In A Blaze of Glory, author and historian Jeff Shaara does a tremendous job of pulling together hundreds of sources and meticulous research. His novel painstakingly recreates the events that led up to Shiloh, and the pivotal moments therein of both commanders over the two-day battle. Both commanders showed daring and ingenuity, but the Battle of Shiloh was unforgiving. By the end of the second day, nearly 24,000 men from both sides were dead, including Johnston. Shaara's novel is the most comprehensive look to date at one of the most pivotal battles of the war, taking readers inside the chaos and horror of Shiloh.

1 Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier: The Narrative of Joseph Plumb Martin

Joseph Plumb Martin

It's rare to find whole and complete memoirs from as far back as the Revolutionary War, specifically from normal people and regular soldiers, which is what makes Joseph Plumb Martin's Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier so special. Joseph Plumb Martin was just a young and naive farmboy and teenager when he left his home in 1775 to join the Continental Army. He'd spend the next eight years fighting under George Washington, crossing the upstart colonies fighting to become a new country.

It wasn't until he was 70 that Martin could bring himself to sit down and write out his memories. What follows is a gripping account – and the most complete one available – from a regular soldier in the war. Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier is a harrowing read that does not shy away from the horrors of war: brutal death and agonizing injuries, marching through bitter cold, and honesty about sometimes incompetent leadership. Far from the protected and wealthy Founding Fathers, Martin's work is a firsthand lesson about what the on-the-ground soldiers endured to birth the country that would become the United States of America.

All of the books on this list can be purchased from Amazon and at any major retailer.