None of us will survive. The arithmetic was inescapable. The squadron started with twelve A-4E Skyhawks and twenty-two pilots. After seven days, it had eight aircraft and nineteen pilots. He had over two hundred days to go. He would never see home again. Dead Men Flying is an honest, unflinching account of how Mike, the college kid, became a warrior called "Mule." It tells of his struggles to become a Naval Aviator. He masters the skills necessary to launch and land a jet fighter bomber on an aircraft carrier. He experiences the transforming state of being when his aircraft merges with his body and becomes an extension of his will; a place where time slows to a crawl; sensory awareness extends to the horizon; and thoughts flash faster than the flick of an eyelid. Within the squadron he develops the bonds of brotherhood that are forged when the pilots must trust each other with their lives. Flying mission after mission from into the heart of the North Vietnamese defenses, he pays the cost when death shatters those bonds. The descriptions of combat are immediate and immersive. They envelope the reader in the perishable art of aerial warfare, a ballet performed out of sight and mind of all but the few who were there. The descriptions are enhanced with more than seventy photographs, many taken during combat. Dead Men Flying is the story of men tested to the breaking point and beyond by unrelenting threat and losses. It tells how they stood together with unflinching resilience, courage, devotion, and sacrifice. The author flew 212 combat missions with the Ghost Riders of Attack Squadron 164 over two cruises between June, 1967 and February, 1969.

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.

Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s—and his broader effort to understand Okinawans’ critical and creative struggles—was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā, the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.

A Century of Remembrance is a study of one hundred outstanding United Kingdom war memorials which commemorate 20th century conflicts from the Boer War to the Falklands and Gulf wars. The first described is a Boer War memorial unveiled on 5 November 1904, and the last is the Animals in War memorial unveiled in London on 24 November 2004.The memorials chosen are listed as near as possible in chronological order and represent different wars, different artists, different areas of the country, and a variety of types of memorial. In category they range from individual to national memorials and include memorials in schools, churches and places of work, and examples representing communities and the armed services. In form they are from statues and stained glass windows to arches, obelisks and cenotaphs, and from cloisters and chapels to art galleries and gardens and even a carillon.

Autobiography detailing the author's life in Africa and career as a pilot.

Irish culture is obsessed with the past, and this book asks why and how. In an innovative reading of Irish culture since 1980, Emilie Pine provides a new analysis of theatre, film, television, memoir and art, and interrogates the anti-nostalgia that characterizes so much of contemporary Irish culture.

This is a historical romance. The subject is World War II, the viewpoint American.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” Selection All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations. “[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War—and which Vietnamese call the American War...As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift—wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity—to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.” —Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times “In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war...[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.” —Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review “Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)