Q. and A. - Kevin Powers and Ben Fountain, National Book Award Nominees - NYTimes.com Two of the nominees in the fiction category for this year's National Book Awards, to be handed out Wednesday night, chronicle America's most recent wars through very different lenses. Kevin Powers, the author of "The Yellow Birds," served with the United States Army in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, and his novel closely follows one soldier through his traumatic experience on the ground and his subsequent troubles adjusting to life back home. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," by Ben Fountain, takes place over the course of a few hours at a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving, where a decorated group of Iraq war soldiers are bewildered participants in a raucous halftime show. In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Powers and Mr. Fountain discussed their approaches to writing about war, the reaction from soldiers to their books and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation. Q. Kevin, did you know while you were serving in Iraq that you would write about it someday? And how much did you draw directly from your experience for the novel? KEVIN POWERS I knew that I would write about it, but only in the sense that writing had been a significant part of my private life since I was 12 or 13. I definitely wasn't consciously thinking about or planning on writing a novel while I was in Iraq. The future seemed impossibly abstract at the time. And I was somewhat preoccupied, as you can probably imagine. Because I am an observer by nature, physical details and sensory stuff in the book is often drawn from my recollections, but I tried to include those details in such a way that I didn't ignore my suspicions about the fragility or unreliable nature of them. I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand. It might even be true to say that what I understood about the war was largely left out of the book. I wanted to try to describe mental states that were as mysterious to me as they probably would be to anyone else. Q. Ben, as far as I know, you were never in the military. What spurred your decision to write about the soldiers in your novel, and what kind of research did you do about the characters? BEN FOUNTAIN "Billy Lynn" came out of a time of complete and utter bewilderment for me. I realized around 2004 that I didn't understand my country. This place where I was born and grew up and lived my entire life, it might as well have been Madagascar, for all I understood about it. It was during this time that I happened to see the halftime show of the Dallas Cowboys football game that always takes place on Thanksgiving. It was pretty much the way I describe it in the book: completely insane, in other words. Just another day in the mind of America, where militant patriotism, Destiny's Child, marching bands, baton twirlers, soldiers, the American flag, advertising and fireworks all get mashed up into one big stew. But it was those soldiers down on the field that got my attention, and in particular a very small group of them, maybe six or seven, who were stumbling around laughing, while everyone around them was marching in strict lock step. It wasn't an idle or trivial thing for me, undertaking a book like this. Since I've never served in the military, never been in a shooting war, I felt like I had to earn the right to write a book like this. I'm still not satisfied that I had the right to do it. POWERS I think Ben's obvious conscientiousness with regard to the seriousness of the subject matter is probably a not insignificant reason why "Billy Lynn" is so good. There seems to be a correlation between this attitude and good, true art that is far more useful as a metric than whether or not experience equals any kind of authority in artistic expression, which for the record I'm pretty sure it doesn't. FOUNTAIN Kevin has a good point, and one that I turned over in my mind a lot leading up to, and during, the writing of "Billy Lynn." So many books have been written that portray an experience far outside of the writer's actual lived experience. "War and Peace" would be one obvious example - Tolstoy wasn't even alive during the Napoleonic wars, and yet he produced this extraordinary book. And then there are the books by men from the point of view of women, and vice versa, or William Styron writing in the voice of Nat Turner, or Norman Mailer presuming to write in Jesus" voice in "The Gospel According to the Son," and then from the Devil's point of view in "The Castle in the Forest." At various times I thought of all these books while trying to rationalize my own effort, but I never did get completely, or even marginally, comfortable with what I was doing. Which, obviously, didn't keep me from writing the book; when I was actually sitting at the desk writing, I rarely thought about it. Q. I'm curious about the balance in your novels between the individual soldier's experience and the broader society's reaction to, or role in, war. Ben, your book has a recurring line: "Oh my people." Am I wrong to think of that as a lamentation of sorts about the civilians who surround the soldiers? FOUNTAIN I think that as much as Billy wants and needs to understand his combat experience, he also wants and needs his fellow Americans - the civilians - to have some understanding, to the extent that's feasible, of what he's done and experienced.