The last trip was notable for another reason: It ended with him being kicked out of the country by the U.S. military. “The way I got disembeded,” he explains, still obviously smarting from the experience, “was in the middle of an interview with a [U.S. Army] officer. A Humvee pulls up, a sergeant gets out, says, ‘You’re in trouble, get in. Turn off the camera.’ It was a whirlwind. Forty-eight hours later I was in my hotel room in Kuwait City, I had no idea what had just happened, I was confused, I was hurt. I had risked my life with these people. I was on their team, what were they doing to me? They had me under armed guard, it was like I was detained, so I got back from that trip convinced that my reputation was ruined and my career was over, but I didn’t even care. I was like, ‘Fuck this. Fuck the Army. Fuck Iraq. I’m gonna go write about interior design or something.’”

But that didn’t happen. The war remains the big story, and the story he most wants to cover. Now that he’s not shuffling off to Iraq every other month, he has been working on a series of books recounting the professional gains, and the personal losses, his year running off to war brought about.

With the first book just published, he’s working on three more: one is called Army 101, which looks at the Army’s ROTC program, another is a memoir recounting his time in Iraq called War is Boring, because, as anyone who has been with the military in a war zone can attest, “War is boring. It’s tedious. There’s a lot of sitting around, waiting in line, so we chose not to focus on that aspect [in the graphic novel]. It’s such a rich experience that you can come at it from a million different tangles, and we picked the addiction angle for War Fix.”

The third book is another graphic novel, called Love and Terror. Like War Fix, Love and Terror grew out of the psychological toll wrought by the loneliness and fear of being in a war zone far from home. Love and Terror has its beginnings in the summer of 2005, after Axe’s girlfriend left him over his obsession with going to Iraq, when he was headed to Basra to report on the murder of American reporter Stephen Vincent. “To get to Basra I had to go through London, and I barely missed the Tube bombing and I knew someone who was caught up in that, a woman I had a relationship with, and that was on my mind when I was in Basra, and it was something I was grappling with, while at the same time I was covering Vincent’s murder, and his murder is caught up in the sexual mores in Basra, so this stuff emerged from my experiences that summer — sex and war and loss and terrorism, all mixed up together.”

I asked if, even given everything that has happened over the past year and a half, he’s itching to get back to Iraq, and if the personal losses have been worth it. He thought about it for a bit. “You gotta be in a particular place, emotionally, to be able to make that transition as frequently as I did. Soldiers do it once, they go to Iraq, they’re there for a year. They have time to sort of settle in and this becomes their reality, then they transition back. It’s a slow process. I compressed six of those cycles in a year.” And of course, I pointed out, soldiers do this as part of a unit. A reporter goes alone. “Exactly,” he shot back. “I went by myself and I felt alone despite being surrounded by soldiers at all times. Looking back on it, I don’t know how the hell I pulled it off. I don’t have it in me any more. Not like that. The fallout was considerable, lost relationships, friendships that will never be the same.”

But, he says, “For better or for worse, this is what I do now, so I’m just on the military beat for different papers and magazines. It’s still military reporting.” While back home for the foreseeable future, Axe is looking forward to trying to get the life he left behind in order. “Things are gonna calm down and stabilize now that I’m not traveling back and forth to Iraq all the time,” he says. “And maybe I’ll even be happier.”

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