Gabe Hudson is a man with war on his mind. Or so that’s how the New Yorker depicted the former Marine Reserve rifle slinger for its June 2001 Debut Fiction issue in a photo accompanying "Dear Mr. President," the title piece from Hudson’s new short-story collection. Eyes squinted, paper and pen at his fingertips, the bespectacled Hudson poses pensively at a Brooklyn-park picnic table accoutered with the iconography of armed combat: four miniature army men and a pea-soup-green gas mask. But over a year later, those props aren’t the image’s most striking symbols of war: peeking over Hudson’s right shoulder are the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

If Hudson had written a book about, say, toy soldiers or toxic waste, the New Yorker portrait would be simply another postcard from a bygone era, an artifact not worth digging out of the archives. But Dear Mr. President is a set of surreal yarns spun around the Gulf War. And these days, its supporting cast (Bush as Fearless Leader, Saddam subbing for Satan, and Allah acting as the enemy’s power supply) and the contents of its prop closet (green berets, biological weapons, and fatally flawed intelligence reports) are as frighteningly familiar as they were in 1991. Consequently, Dear Mr. President’s empirical weight is greater than the heft of its parts: intended as a satirical scrutiny of American war lore, Hudson’s words unwittingly testify to historical repetition — a motif of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which envisages history as a spiral, human conflict as recycled drama, and time as a rotary continuum.

Comprising seven short stories and a novella, Dear Mr. President is a brigade of tragicomic antiheroes who are all haplessly, albeit humorously, groping for vindication. In "Cross-Dresser," Air Force captain Dugan argues ardently that the reason his wife found him gussied up in white gloves, flowered panties, and a gown is that he’s possessed by the spirit of their dead 13-year-old daughter. As Larry, the 22-year-old narrator of "The Cure As I Found It," feels his skeleton slowly crumbling, he prays that his battlefield sins won’t prevent him from passing through the pearly gates. After sprouting a third ear and alienating his revolted wife, loyal Lance Corporal Laverne composes the title epistle, a delusional fan letter/SOS signal that begs Bush the First for salvation, thereby becoming a boot-camp revamp of Eminem’s Stan.

"The simple fact of the matter is that war makes people commit horrible acts," Larry-with-the-melting-marrow admits, thereby exonerating Hudson’s ward of VA patients. But their transgressions are more brutal than mere ear-budding and wife-estranging: missive-scribbler Laverne pummels an unlucky stray puppy into a pulp; the woman in "Woman in Uniform" hammers a scurrilous Saudi boy to death; in the novella "Notes From a Bunker Along Highway 8," a Special-Forces-member-turned-antiwar-crusader crazily imprisons an amputee infantryman in a monkey cage.

At times, Dear Mr. President reads like George Saunders reimagining a week of M*A*S*H* reruns, with Chuck Palahniuk scripting bonus battle scenes. Equal parts travesty and tragedy, it manages to be both febrile and funny, sad and sardonic. In wiping away the sheen of heroism typical of war myths, Hudson stands on the shoulders of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, telling of combat-zone casualties who not only are victims of wars they "fought," but who suffer laughable and undignified demises. A chomped-off ear flies through the air "like a tiny Frisbee." A private is "torn in two like a movie ticket." And when a fumbled grenade dismembers a clumsy fighter, the moment is more slapstick than slaughterous: "Thrash’s right hand, violently emancipated from the rest of his body, shot out and slapped one of the charging Bedouins in the face."

But above all, Dear Mr. President is a phalanx of ingeniously twisted tales that revolve around an Iraq attack — and reading it in 2002 gives one a strange case of déjà vu: CNN, the Bush family’s Texas ranch, the rallying cry "Let’s roll," the Arab adversaries, and "Saddam’s biologically laced Devil Air." As one character says, "I felt for a moment as if this were truly World War III, or, more precisely, Hell, and here we were, endowed by God Almighty — Manifest Destiny come back to the Holy Land to cast out the Prince of Darkness himself." Hudson wrote that line — a Marine’s memory of entering Kuwait — before 9/11, but the sentiment resonates.

So now, more than 10 years after Operation Desert Storm, at a time when history seems to be a merry-go-round of militarism, Hudson’s work serves as an important reminder — or rather, a warning — that war, no matter how intellectually reasoned or morally justified, turns men into monsters. As George Santayana once cautioned, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Then again, as Vonnegut once wrote, "So it goes."