Fictionalized accounts of war can be gripping and impactful. Nonfiction books and memoirs about war, however, are more powerful coming from the people who lived through it. There are excellent memoirs from the Revolutionary War up to the modern day.

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...