I just finished the audiobook of Don Malarkey's memoir, Easy Company Soldier, and it was surprisingly lovely. I'll do up a proper review here eventually, but I wanted to take a moment to appreciate Don's memoir and just the library of memoirs surrounding the HBO War series in general.

Not all of them are expertly crafted, but it's such an unusual and strangely satisfying fandom experience to be able to look at a piece of canon and say, "I'd like to know more about that," and be able to actually go and find content that expands on some of the events and relationships you're looking into. I've got kind of a strange relationship with RPF in that I have a pretty hard mental divide between the actual guys and the caricatures of them that are portrayed in the shows (and which I now use to create additional fanworks) but it's still really fun to have a canon resource to flesh out a character who doesn't get much screen time in the series proper if you need it.

Anyway, if you're not opposed to really gratuitous fishing references, Malarkey's book is one of the better ones that came out of the series hullabaloo, imo, and worth a read. Especially if you're at all interested in Joe Toye, because let me tell you, there's so much quality Joe content in the book. SO MUCH.