The first combat memoir of the War on Terrorism: the gripping story of a young man’s transformation into a twenty-first-century warrior. Born into a family with a long history of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, Andrew Exum enrolled in Army ROTC to pay for his Ivy League education. Shortly after graduation in 2000, he joined the infantry, then endured the grueling rigors of Ranger School before becoming a platoon leader with the storied 10th Mountain Division. He thought that perhaps, if he was lucky, he and his men would see action on a peacekeeping mission. Then came the fateful events of September 11, 2001. Called to action as a twenty-three-year-old, he led his troops into Afghanistan to root out the hard-core remnants of Osama bin Laden’s forces. Thrown into the maelstrom of modern war, Exum contended with Afghani warlords, cable news correspondents, and the military bureaucracy while hunting a desperate enemy in a treacherous land—and on a mountain ridge in the Shah-e-Kot Valley he would confront and kill an al-Qaeda fighter. After returning home, Exum struggled to come to terms with the media coverage and public perception of the war while seeking to make peace with the man he had become. By turns harrowing and reflective, this powerful memoir gives voice to a generation of soldiers that has risen to confront the threats of a dangerous new world.

Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers’ own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington’s army and the course of the war. Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers’ perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for its independence.

The question of women's role in the military is extremely topical. A Woman and a Soldier covers the experiences of women in the military from the late mediaeval period to the present day. Written in two volumes this comprehensive guide covers a wide range of wars: The Thirty Years War, the French and Indian Wars in Northern America, the Anglo-Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Long March in China, and the Vietnam War. There are also thematic chapters, including studies of terrorism and contemporary military service. Taking a multidisciplinary approach: historical, anthropological, and cultural, the book shows the variety of arguments used to support or deny women's military service and the combat taboo. In the process the book challenges preconceived notions about women's integration in the military and builds a picture of the ideological and practical issues surrounding women soldiers.

Creates A Warm And Vivid Portrait Of Lee, The Man, As Well As Of Lee The General.

In a world on the brink of war, four superpowered teens must learn to work together for peace in Caitlin Lochner's action-packed debut novel, A Soldier and A Liar. Lai Cathwell is good at keeping secrets. As a Nyte, a supernaturally gifted teenager who is feared and shunned by the ungifted, this skill is essential to survival. Orchestrating her own imprisonment to escape military duty has only honed her ability to deceive others. But when rebels start attacking the city, Lai is dragged back into the fight with a new team of Nytes. Thrown together with Jay, a self-conscious perfectionist consumed by the desire to be accepted; Al, a short-tempered fighter lying for the sake of revenge; and Erik, an amnesiac hell-bent on finding his memories and his place in the world, Lai realizes she’s facing an entirely different kind of challenge—one that might just be impossible. But if this team can't learn to work together, the entire sector will be plunged into war.

A young aesthete from a privileged Roman family, Alexandro Giuliani, found his charmed existence shattered by the coming of WWI. Highly recommended.

"Ever wonder what a soldier actually does? Why does he dress that way? Could I be a soldier one day? Private First Class Sam Smith is a soldier in the U.S. Army. Come along with Sam as he tells all about what it's like to live, work, and (even) relax like a soldier."

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.

Housam 'Sam' Najjair was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Libyan father. In June 2011, as his father's home country was being torn apart by civil war, he left Ireland on a one-way ticket to Tunisia, crossing into war-torn Libya, to join the uprising against the dictator Gaddafi. Soldier for a Summer charts his journey - from his arrival into Libya to training in the Western Mountains for twelve weeks before advancing on Tripoli. On 20 August 2011, Sam and the now famous Tripoli Brigade - a unit of the National Liberation Army of Libya - were the first revolutionaries to enter the city, and subsequently secure it and Martyrs' Square. From meeting representatives of NATO to covert operatives, arms deals, the death of his close friend and colleague, safe-houses and a captured girl sniper, this is the astounding story of how a young Irish-Libyan revolutionary became a battlefield commander of a unit of the National Liberation Army of Libya - an unforgettable account of a single season that liberated a country and transformed a young man.