The searing account of a war crime and one soldier’s heroic efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice First published in the New Yorker in 1969 and later adapted into an acclaimed film starring Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn, Casualties of War is the shocking true story of the abduction, rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by US soldiers. Before setting out on a five-day reconnaissance mission in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, Sergeant Tony Meserve told the four men under his command that their first objective would be to kidnap a girl and bring her along “for the morale of the squad.” At the end of the mission, Meserve said, they would kill their victim and dispose of the body to avoid prosecution for abduction and rape—capital crimes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Private First Class Sven Eriksson was the only member of the patrol who refused to participate in the atrocity. Haunted by his inability to save the young woman’s life, he vowed to see Meserve and the others convicted of their crimes. Faced with the cynical indifference of his commanding officers and outright hostility from his fellow infantrymen, Eriksson had the tenacity to persevere. He went on to serve as the government’s chief witness in four courts-martial related to the infamous Incident on Hill 192. A masterpiece of contemporary journalism, Casualties of War is a clear-eyed, powerfully affecting portrait of the horrors of warfare and the true meaning of courage.

From New York Times bestselling author Charles Todd comes a haunting tale that explores the impact of World War I on all who witnessed it—officers, soldiers, doctors, and battlefield nurses like Bess Crawford. Though the Great War is nearing its end, the fighting rages on. While waiting for transport back to her post, Bess Crawford meets Captain Alan Travis from the island of Barbados. Later, when he’s brought into her forward aid station disoriented from a head wound, Bess is alarmed that he believes his distant English cousin, Lieutenant James Travis, shot him. Then the Captain is brought back to the aid station with a more severe wound, once more angrily denouncing the Lieutenant as a killer. But when it appears that James Travis couldn’t have shot him, the Captain’s sanity is questioned. Still, Bess wonders how such an experienced officer could be so wrong. On leave in England, Bess finds the Captain strapped to his bed in a clinic for brain injuries. Horrified by his condition, Bess and Sergeant Major Simon Brandon travel to James Travis’s home in Suffolk, to learn more about the baffling relationship between these two cousins. Her search will lead this smart, capable, and compassionate young woman into unexpected danger, and bring her face to face with the visible and invisible wounds of war that not even the much-longed for peace can heal.

Prayer is a powerful weapon, a two-edged sword not to be wielded carelessly. There are certain types of prayer Satan would like us to use. Although we have authority as the children of God, how we fight can determine the personal consequences of our spiri

"The best Vietnam War novels yet for this age range." -- Kirkus Reviews Morris, Rudi, Ivan, and Beck are best friends for life. So when one of the teens is drafted into the Vietnam War, the others sign up, too. Although they each serve in a different branch, they are fighting the war together -- and they promise to do all they can to come home together.Of the four, it's Beck that has the most to lose. He's the smart one of the bunch, and he could be -- SHOULD be -- going to college. His parents certainly think so. But he has a pact to honor, and so Beck enlists in the US Air Force.As their tours of duty near completion and the war itself spirals further out of control, the four best friends are at last on a collision course. Will they all survive long enough to be reunited?

Thousands of wounded servicemen returned to Japan following the escalation of Japanese military aggression in China in July 1937. Tens of thousands would return home after Japan widened its war effort in 1939. In Casualties of History, Lee K. Pennington relates for the first time in English the experiences of Japanese wounded soldiers and disabled veterans of Japan's "long" Second World War (from 1937 to 1945). He maps the terrain of Japanese military medicine and social welfare practices and establishes the similarities and differences that existed between Japanese and Western physical, occupational, and spiritual rehabilitation programs for war-wounded servicemen, notably amputees. To exemplify the experience of these wounded soldiers, Pennington draws on the memoir of a Japanese soldier who describes in gripping detail his medical evacuation from a casualty clearing station on the front lines and his medical convalescence at a military hospital. Moving from the hospital to the home front, Pennington documents the prominent roles adopted by disabled veterans in mobilization campaigns designed to rally popular support for the war effort. Following Japan’s defeat in August 1945, U.S. Occupation forces dismantled the social welfare services designed specifically for disabled military personnel, which brought profound consequences for veterans and their dependents. Using a wide array of written and visual historical sources, Pennington tells a tale that until now has been neglected by English-language scholarship on Japanese society. He gives us a uniquely Japanese version of the all-too-familiar story of soldiers who return home to find their lives (and bodies) remade by combat.

Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good." Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.

This study of friendly fire on civilians during the London Blitz and the attack on Pearl harbor exposes the unknown horror behind these iconic WWII events. The London Blitz and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have ascended to the level of myth for Britain and America. Yet both of these artfully constructed narratives of heroic resistance to aerial bombardment conceal the massacre of citizens by the very militaries charged with protecting them. In Britain, thousands of civilians were killed when the army shelled London and other cities to prevent residents from fleeing the German bombs. At Pearl Harbor, American warships fired their heavy guns at the city of Honolulu with devastating results. Simon Webb begins this volume with an overview of bombing and anti-aircraft guns from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 through to the First World War. He then reveals the casualties which friendly fire from heavy artillery inflicted upon British and American civilians during World War Two. In the case of the British, these deaths were a deliberate part of a shockingly cynical policy. There were times during the German bombing of London when more people were being killed by British shells than by enemy bombs.

Not all casualties of war die on the battlefield. In the wake of World War II, Yugoslavia purged its territory of the ethnic Germans who had formed a part of its human mosaic. Tarred with their ethnic origins and the conscription of their fighting-age men into the Waffen SS, the Volksdeutsche, as these settlers were called, were rounded up at the war's end and herded into concentration camps. Those who were not murdered or did not die from the harsh conditions were expelled from the village homes their families had known and loved for three hundred years. Nine years old when she entered the concentration camp in 1945, author Luisa Lang Owen survived the persecution of the Danube Swabians, eventually finding herself in America, where she made a new life for herself, a life that nonetheless held within it the memories and lessons of the atrocities she had experienced in her homeland. Like thousands of other Germans in the Danube Valley at the end of the war, Luisa and her family were chased from their home, lodged in a sheep stall, and resettled in camps with other Germans from her village. Shorn of their possessions, given little food or fuel, pressed into hard labor, beaten by guards, and separated from their families, many despaired and many died. Luisa barely survived as others succumbed to malnutrition, disease, and exposure. Her haunting memoir provides a window into the ethnic cleansing that preceded the recent exterminations in Bosnia and Kosovo by fifty years—an episode of horrors that has not appeared as even a footnote in descriptions of the more recent atrocities practiced in that region. Her testament, as a casualty of war, bears historic witness and gives insight into the personal experiences of ethnic cleansing. It stands as witness to a massive crime that has been conveniently forgotten, a corrective to a bit of neglect that did away with its victims as a people, and a personal depiction of what ethnic cleansing is really about. “The problem was not just that they did not want us to have or to be,” Luisa Lang Owen writes, “they wanted us not to have been.”

'A work of formidable imaginative scope' Daily Telegraph The first casualty when war comes is truth . . . Flanders, June 1917: a British officer and celebrated poet, is shot dead. , He is killed not by German fire, but while recuperating from shell shock well behind the lines. A young English soldier is arrested and, although he protests his innocence, charged with his murder. Douglas Kingsley is a conscientious objector, previously a detective with the London police, now imprisoned for his beliefs. He is released and sent to France in order to secure a conviction. Forced to conduct his investigations amidst the hell of The Third Battle of Ypres, Kingsley soon discovers that both the evidence and the witnesses he needs are quite literally disappearing into the mud that surrounds him. Ben Elton's tenth novel is a gut-wrenching historical drama which explores some fundamental questions: What is murder? What is justice in the face of unimaginable daily slaughter? And where is the honour in saving a man from the gallows if he is only to be returned to die in a suicidal battle?