The years following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq witnessed a remarkable influx of American literature about Iraq, documenting in various literary forms the perspective of its combatants while appealing to a dominant national imaginary of selective memory. Most of these narratives have been inspired by personal accounts, initially drawing on the biographical experiences of servicemen and (to a far less extent) servicewomen, most of whom having briefly served in the US invasion of Iraq in some capacity. With the support of such institutions as the MFA program, these experiences have typically been curated and transformed into works of literary fiction. This group of soldier-cum-writers includes Kevin Powers, Phil Klay, Matt Gallagher, Brian Turner and Elliot Ackerman, to name a few. In addition to winning major critical acclaim over the years, these writers have come to redefine the contours of contemporary war literature for the years to come. At the heart of this genre is an inherent paradox: the (American) soldier’s/writer’s initial wrestling with the presumed incommunicability of traumatic war memory has – in the years following the invasion – opened the floodgates of war writing: novels and short stories, poetry collections and memoirs, all of which inevitably participating in a complex process of creating and disseminating war memory. This process is best examined by considering the central role of what Viet Thanh Nguyen, in the context of the Vietnam War, calls the memory industry, or “the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memory industry." The process through which these testimonies are curated, fictionalized, and circulated as literary and historical documents of war, and the extent to which they are predicated on de-prioritizing other voices (most notably of Iraqi writers) that don’t fit into the national narrative, will be the focus of this paper. By drawing on literary history and theories of literary capital, this paper will examine some of these texts on two levels: on one hand, it will analyze the specific literary protocols these writers have employed to narrate experience and articulate traumatic revelation/memory. On the other hand, these literary protocols will be studied within the complex economy of literary circulation and the institutional dominance of creative writing programs, shaping the trajectory of a typical war production and the notion of writing as expression and resolution of trauma.