Books! An alternative to
the steaming pile of crap served up by Fox News, the drivel and pap that is CNN
and the sanitized musing s of PBS.
“Redeployment” by Phil Klay takes
readers to the front lines of the war in Iraq, asking us to understand what
happened to the soldiers who returned. His work reveals the intricate
combination of monotony, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier’s
daily life at war and the isolation, remorse and despair that can accompany a
soldier’s homecoming.
Klay is a Dartmouth
graduate and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq during the
surge and subsequently received an MFA from Hunter College.
“No Good Men Among the
Living: America, The Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes” is a breathtaking,
deeply researched chronicle that
details the lives of three Afghans caught in America’s war on terror – a
Taliban commander who rises from a scrawny teenager to a leading insurgent; a
US-backed warlord who uses the American military to gain personal wealth and
power; and a village housewife trapped between two sides who discovers the
devastating cost of neutrality.
Through their dramatic
stories, author Anand Gopal shows that the Afghan war, so often regarded as a
hopeless quagmire, could have gone very differently. Top Taliban leaders
actually tried to surrender within months of the US invasion, renouncing all
political activity and submitting to the new government. Effectively, the
Taliban ceased to exist – yet the Americans were unwilling to accept such a
turnaround. Instead, driven by false intelligence and an unyielding mandate to
fight, American forces continued to press the conflict, resurrecting the
insurgency that persists to this day.
Anand Gopal is a
journalist covering Afghanistan, Syria and other international hot spots. He
has served as an Afghanistan correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and The
Christian Science Monitor and has reported for Harper’s, The Nation, Foreign
Policy and other respected journals.
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