In this breathtaking memoir, Adam Harmon, a U.S. soldier who served 13 years in the Israeli Army, tells of being a part of one of the finest, most unconventional militaries in the world. of photos.

THE LITTLE WAR OF PRIVATE POST is a stirring, funny, brave, sympathetic piece of Americana—the memoir of a foot soldier in the Spanish-American War who happened also to be a first-rate artist, carrying a sketchbook along with his gun. It is a GI’s view of the invasion of Cuba in June 1898, from the moment that Charles Johnson Post passed the jumping test, the coughing test and the eyesight test and became a soldier to the day he returned to New York, gaunt and fever-ridden—the first man back from San Juan Hill. In April, Private Post was among the raw recruits assembled at Camp Black on Hempstead Plains, Long Island. He is eloquent about the soldier’s diet of coffee, hardtack, and sowbelly, “rancid and translucent in decay”; about the practice drills in close order formation, “much as in the days of Waterloo or Gettysburg”; about his fellow soldiers, their clothing, daily life, and esprit de corps. Post has such a good-humored, straight view of his own and others’ experiences that throughout the book all that is dismal, painful, malarial, hot, deathly and serious becomes touching, brave and ludicrous—though never losing dignity. The writer’s pen and the artist’s brush re-create for us the invasion of Cuba, one of the most brilliant campaigns of our entire military history—despite fantastic blunders before, during and after it. Rubber ponchos peeled; woolen uniforms were ridiculous in the Cuban heat; horses were so scarce that the Rough Riders had nothing to ride; and after Santiago had capitulated, General Shafter waited and waited while his troops died of disease, far removed from medical care. THE LITTLE WAR OF PRIVATE POST is the chronicle of individual men on a wide canvas. Many of them died, and death gives to the little routines of their lives an epic significance. This was an “old-fashioned” war, but in it we find much that is illuminating today—particularly so because it is on a small, personal scale.

Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.

DIVA wide-eyed teenager during much of the Revolutionary War, Martin recounts in grim detail his harrowing confrontations with gnawing hunger, bitter cold, and the fear of battle. /div

Bearing his medical discharge from the fledgling American Expeditionary Force after only four months as a trainee in the 1st Massachusetts Ambulance Corps, the author became one of thousands of American youths who sought adventure and validation by traveling North to offer their wartime services as members of the C.E.F. His account, finished in 1927, chronicles his brief U.S. Army experience, and more extensively, the next 20 months--from the signing of his Attestation papers in September, 1917 in Fredericton, N.B., to his release from active duty at St John, in May, 1919--as a Canadian soldier. Beginning with basic drill and an introduction to light artillery in Canada, he moved on to more intensive training in England, to become a charter member of an entirely new unit--the 12th (6-inch howitzer) Battery, 3rd Brigade, CGA. Not just a record of combat in France, the story encompasses a totality of military life as it impacted the author and his close companions. He faithfully records battlefield and bivouac experiences, anecdotes of both legal and unsanctioned absences in five countries, the formation (and shattering) of close friendships, of the strange realization of his having been wounded, and gassed, and his consequent hospitalization and recovery. Following an unauthorized reunification with his Battery mates in Belgium, he describes the boredom of post war occupation, demobilization via Kinmel Park in Wales, his return to Canada, and finally, the long and eagerly anticipated, yet strangely abrupt and poignant emptiness that attended his return to civilian life. The author's highly personal and well documented narrative is enhanced by the inclusion of letters written home, numerous scans of photographs and memorabilia that survived his epoch journey as well as a number of original pen and ink drawings that complement his writing.

This memoir records Mr. Griffins life during his twenty years of military service. It begins when he was eighteen and joined the army and ends when he retired at thirty-eight. It describes his flaws, struggles, successes, failures, weaknesses, and insecurities as he faced the challenges of military service. At the same time, it examines the relationship between two kids who got married too young. It describes their struggles and failures during the turmoil of army life, including many overseas moves, raising kids, loneliness from frequent and long separations, and the results.

2016 Santa Fe literary awards - finalist 2016 Next Generation Indie Book awards - finalist 2016 USA Best Book Awards - finalist in the memoir category 2016 Author Awards, 2nd place in the memoir category A SheKnows.com and Mind Body and Green Must-Read! Featured in Buzzfeed, Working Mother Magazine, The Reading Room, Brit and Co., Writer's Digest, Style, Huffington Post, Jewish Book Council, and Jewish Values Center. At age nineteen, Dorit Sasson, a dual American-Israeli citizen, was trying to make the status quo work as a college student—until she realized that if she didn’t distance herself from her neurotic, worrywart of a mother, she would become just like her. Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces is Sasson’s story of how she dropped out of college and volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces in an effort to change her life—and how, in stepping out of her comfort zone and into a war zone, she discovered courage and faith she didn’t know she was capable of.

This thoughtful memoir recounts one man's transformation from a glory-seeking, gung-ho Kansas teenager to a weary, twice-wounded grunt who had volunteered for a second tour of duty. Enlisting in the Army in June 1964 at age 17, Micheal Clodfelter was assigned to an artillery battalion of the 101st Airborne Division and arrived at Cam Ranh Bay on July 29, 1965; on August 9, 1966, after having requested a transfer to the infantry, he was assigned to Charlie Company, 2/502nd Airborne, serving in Phu Yen and Kontum provinces. A second injury resulted in his medical evacuation from Vietnam on January 8, 1967. Describing the intensity of "mad minutes" (the general discharge of all weapons along a defense perimeter to discourage a potential enemy attack) amid the monotony, exhaustion and horror of war, Clodfelter writes of entering "a territory from which none of us ever really returned."

When four-star general John Rogers Galvin retired from the US Army after forty-four years of distinguished service in 1992, the Washington Post hailed him as a man "without peer among living generals." In Fighting the Cold War: A Soldier's Memoir, the celebrated soldier, scholar, and statesman recounts his active participation in more than sixty years of international history—from the onset of World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the post–Cold War era. Galvin's illustrious tenure included the rare opportunity to lead two different Department of Defense unified commands: United States Southern Command in Panama from 1985 to 1987 and United States European Command from 1987 to 1992. In his memoir, he recounts fascinating behind-the-scenes anecdotes about his interactions with world leaders, describing encounters such as his experience of watching President José Napoleón Duarte argue eloquently against US intervention in El Salvador; a private conversation with Pope John Paul II in which the pontiff spoke to him about what it means to be a man of peace; and his discussion with General William Westmoreland about soldiers' conduct in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. In addition, Galvin recalls his complex negotiations with a number of often difficult foreign heads of state, including Manuel Noriega, Augusto Pinochet, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ratko Mladić. As NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the tumultuous five years that ended the Cold War, Galvin played a key role in shaping a new era. Fighting the Cold War illuminates his leadership and service as one of America's premier soldier-statesmen, revealing him to be not only a brilliant strategist and consummate diplomat but also a gifted historian and writer who taught and mentored generations of students.