On September 12, 2001, a year and a half after finishing his military service, Sean Davis strolled into the Oregon National Guard’s recruiting office and re-enlisted. His memoir The Wax Bullet War: Chronicles of a Soldier & Artist traces his experiences in the following years as he discovers the oddities of a pop-up America in a hostile desert wasteland; loses his best friend in a violent ambush; returns, critically wounded, to confinement in a place that’s not his home; deals with the fallout of PTSD and the horror of what he experienced in that war zone; and finally rediscovers art and its power to heal.