More of this first person stuff.

As I previously said, most of the novel is written from the first person point of view. It involves sentences like "I wasn't there when he got hurt, but Mitchell Sanders later told me the essential facts," (page 208). The first person point of view is a very effective choice when writing a war story. It creates a believability and a timelessness that the third person point of view struggles to create. The reader knows that the author experienced the events that he is writing about, so they are much easier to believe. The reader is also more likely to feel sympathy for the characters because they are more easily seen as real people, because they are talked about as having relationships with the author. This makes the novel and its stories come to life in the mind of the reader, because it is written from the first person point of view.
The timelessness comes from that fact that the story comes to life. The reader doesn't see the story as a factual account of something that happened years ago, but rather as a set of events that could easily happen in their lifetime. They can now relate to the novel on a deeper level. The novel, though about an event that happened in a specific time in history, can be applied to any era and any person's life. This comes from its being written from the first person point of view.