[10][14][15] USA Today reported that Ackerman was the assault force commander of a group of US Marines that carried out a raid that led to the death of an estimated 33 to 92 civilians in Azizabad, Afghanistan, in August 2008.

In this case, however, the comparison seems unusually apt ... Elliot Ackerman has done something brave as a writer and even braver as a soldier: He has touched, for real, the culture and soul of his enemy.

[27] The Los Angeles Review of Books describes the novel as a "radical departure from veterans writing thus far" due to his choice of a first-person narrator, the lowly Aziz, a poor soldier in a local militia.

[28] The Stars and Stripes review described Green on Blue and Phil Klay's Redeployment as carrying "the sting of authenticity and the sensory expression of experiences lived".

In a starred review Library Journal wrote, "Here is a thriller, psychological fiction, political intrigue, and even a love story all wrapped into a stunningly realistic and sometimes horrifying package.

He has created people who are not the equivalents of the locally exotic subjects in your average NPR story, and he has used them to populate a fascinating and topical novel.

The book was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and it won the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's James Webb Award.

In his short novel, Ackerman accomplishes what a mountain of maximalist books have rarely delivered over tens of thousands of pages and a few decades: He makes pure character-based literary art, dedicated only to deeply human storytelling ... Cusk's Outline trilogy and Jenny Offill's Dept.

The micro-level power of his unadorned and direct prose lies in no less than an attempt to contain and dramatize the darkness and light of our souls ... To identify this book as a novel seems inadequate: Waiting for Eden is a sculpture chiseled from the rarest slab of life experience.

[citation needed] Ackerman's fourth book Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning was published June 11, 2019, by Penguin Press.

The novel was nominated for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction[38] and was also a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.

[39] Author Joan Silber wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Having worked so impressively at overturning the conventions of war fiction, Ackerman has now written a novel without a single soldier in it ...

He's decided on a different sort of drama, a territory of intrigue and tricks, entirely absorbing, with other sources of suspense ... Ackerman's rich knowledge of Turkey is evident on every page.

[41] In The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan, Ackerman recounts his life as an infantry officer on combat missions, his decision to leave the military, and the efforts to get Afghans out of the country in 2021 when the U.S. pulled out.

[44] His article "Why Bringing Back the Draft Could Stop America's Forever Wars" was featured on the cover of the October 21, 2019, issue of Time magazine.