>>96710807
The book and the movie are doing very different things to shortcut into sympathetic projecting, and I like both of them. They were effective at doing exactly what they should for their respective medium.
One is drawing from your emotional core telling stories you'd hear from buddies around a fire, and the other is harrowing with physiological impact that you are experiencing with the character as it happens.
The movie is shot in a specific way to control when and where the viewer feels relaxed and often disrupts it, leading you to get to this heart rending place where the young man singing in the woods feels genuinely cathartic. If you don't sink into it I don't think you'll get that same reaction as I did, but my point is only, that both forms of this story, as different as they are, do a great job for very very different reasons.
Personally though, when it comes to horrors of war stress movies there's no better than Come and See