The Prequel to the Bestselling Thank You for Your Service, Now a Major Motion Picture With The Good Soldiers, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Finkel has produced an eternal story — not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time. It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. It became known as "the surge." Among those called to carry it out were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them. Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home — forever changed. The chronicle of their tour is gripping, devastating, and deeply illuminating for anyone with an interest in human conflict.

When Kipling says in "The Young British Soldier," "I'll sing you a soldier as fair as I may," he reminds us that a soldier is made of the words of poetry, history, and the laws and language of his calling. The complete solider is not only a contributor to the civilization that he or she serves. Drawing from military history, sociology, and other disciplines, Solidiers and Civilization covers the history of the military profession in the Western world from the ancient Greeks to the present day and shows how both soldiers and their civilizations have helped mold each other over time. Reed Bonadonna goes beyond traditional insights to locate the military profession in the context of both literary and cultural history, maintaining that soldiers have made an unacknowledged contribution to the theory and practice of civilization, and that they will again be called upon to do so in important ways. Throughout history soldiers have sought instruction and inspiration from the past to gain insight into modern conflicts. Military professionals of today must know, heed, and apply the examples and narrative of the most successful and exemplary of their predecessors to help advance a civilization into its future. However, this process can succeed only when it includes critical self-examination and a discourse with the larger society it serves. Soldiers and Civilization argues that the military profession, in its broadest consideration, might be viewed as an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities, a repository of important practical and abstract knowledge on armed conflict, ethics, community, and human nature. By representing and upholding the values on which civilization is founded, true military professionals provide the stability for it to thrive and create new ideas, thereby ensuring an existential symbiosis that serves and preserves both. -- from dust jacket.

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.

This book suggests a general framework for the analysis of formative factors in military thought and offers an account of the Israel Defense Force’s state of intellectualism and modernity. This account is followed by an attempt to trace the factors that have shaped Israeli military thought. The explanations are a mixture of realist and non-realist factors, which can be found at both the systemic and the state level of analysis. At the systemic level, realist evaluations focus on factors such as the dominance of the technological dimension and the pervasiveness of asymmetrical, low-intensity conflict; whereas at the state level one can find realist explanations, cultural factors, and societal influences. Moral and legal constraints also factor into both the systemic and state levels.

Veterans of the Vietnam Conflict When I was Young and Wild; No longer a Child, I went to War with my Brothers. From the North, East, the South and the West; we were, America's best. Many lost their Girls and Wives to Jody; along with their Booty! He was their best friend! While we were away, Jody did play! We went to fight; for you, and the Red White and Blue. We were taught: To shoot between the eyes, that way we knew they would die! We were highly trained in Weapons of Mass Destruction and, Combat (Hand to Hand)! Bullets would scream by our heads, one Inch closer, we'd be dead. The sounds of the Big Guns would pierce our Ear Drums. Bombs and Napalm would fall from the Sky: Many men died on both sides; No matter how much, they tried to hide! Booby Traps and Land Mines were all around, on Tree Trunks, in and on the ground. Atop the Trees, Charlie would wait for us, to take his Bait. Immersed in Water; with Weapons above our heads, slowly we moved, make NO sound or we'd be dead. Our way through Villages we made: Children approached us with Grenades. Charlie would hide everywhere, of our Soldiers, they were scared! The Cong were famous for the Tunnels in the ground, in our Tunnel Rats they were Bound, Armed with only a 45, they left no none alive! The Jungles were full of Tigers and Snakes, our Lives they could take! Those 2 days in the Rear; the Women we had to fear! "5 Dollars GI, Me make You Feel Real Good"! Entice us they would! Inside them; a Razor Blade they would embed, as to make Us Dead! Our Tracers Red, their Tracers Green, in the night they could be seen! To Fight at Night, No Moon light, 'twas a Terrible Fright! Our MOTTO was: NEVER GIVE UP NOR ADMIT DEFEAT! There was No Call for Retreat! As We Charged Into Battle, We would Yell: REMEMBER THE "BLACK HORSE"! WE'LL SEE YOU IN HELL! We were the Cav, the 11th Cav. No fight did we Loose, Most Fights we did choose. A Solider Then, A Solider Now,

The epic story of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division, whose elite soldiers broke the last line of German defenses in Italy's mountains in 1945, spearheading the Allied advance to the Alps and final victory.