Scott Beauchamp’s Did You Kill Anyone? is a difficult book to classify. It is, in a loose sense, a military memoir: a first-person account of Beauchamp’s five years in the Army, spent largely on bases in the United States, Germany, and Iraq. It’s also a kind of bildungsroman, detailing Beauchamp’s transformation from a Kerouac-reading Missouri teenager into a theology-reading adult, still something of a seeker but chastened and matured by the experience of war. Most of all, this slim volume is, as its subtitle suggests, a “critique of modern culture” — one in which Beauchamp holds up the culture of the military, with its hierarchy and ritual and intense solidarity, as a mirror to illuminate what he sees as the shortcomings of civilian life, the ways in which it leaves people starved of the kinds of deep communal and religious experiences that humans always and everywhere long for.

The title of Did You Kill Anyone? is something of a head fake. This is ultimately a book about the relationship between civilian and military culture, and the question of the title is, as Beauchamp writes in the book’s opening pages, “the biggest and most intimidating” of the questions he expected to receive upon returning to civilian life. But it is also the easiest to sweep aside, especially when coming from therapists or drunks outside of parties. The real question that Beauchamp takes up in this book, the one he says that his postwar acquaintances in Brooklyn “should have asked if they wanted to understand” military service, is, “Do you miss it?” Beauchamp avoids giving a direct answer until the book’s postscript, but the titles of his chapters clue the reader in to the fact that the answer is at least a qualified, “Yes.”