"Raw, direct, and powerful...This work is vitally important."—Ken Stern, former CEO of National Public Radio As a captain in the Army National Guard, Benjamin Tupper spent a year in Afghanistan. Separated from most of his unit, Ben, along with his partner Corporal Radoslaw “Ski” Polanski, served in an Embedded Training Team, teaching, training, and leading into combat the green Afghan troops. But what they experienced went well beyond the assigned mission, and the war proved to be a mix of drudgery, absurdity, and ever-present dangers. Writing and recording from a remote outpost, Tupper began to share his stories with Americans back home. His boots-on-the-ground dispatches were broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition and published on Slate.com’s military blog, The Sandbox. In Greetings from Afghanistan: Send More Ammo, Benjamin Tupper’s chronicling of life under fire pulls the reader into the realities of war with poignancy, humor, and vivid reality, offering a unique and compelling firsthand view of the Afghan people, their culture, and a battle for survival that began long before the Americans arrived.

Winner of the Caforio prize for the best book in armed forces and civil-military relations published between 2015 and 2016 In On Military Memoirs Esmeralda Kleinreesink offers insight into military books: who were their writers and publishers, what were their plots, and what motives did their authors have for writing them. Every Afghanistan war autobiography published in the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands between 2001 and 2010 is compared quantitatively and qualitatively. On Military Memoirs shows that soldier-authors are a special breed; that self-published books still cater to different markets than traditionally published ones; that cultural differences are clearly visible between warrior nations and non-warrior nations; that not every contemporary memoir is a disillusionment story; and that writing is serious business for soldiers wanting to change the world. The book provides an innovative example of how to use interdisciplinary, mixed-method, cross-cultural research to analyse egodocuments.

"Understanding the United States' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is essential to understanding the United States in the first decade of the new millennium and beyond. These wars were pivotal to American foreign policy and international relations. They raised critical ethical and legal questions; they provoked debates over policy, strategy, and war planning; they helped to shape American domestic politics. And they highlighted a profound division among the American people: While more than two million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority of American and their families remained untouched by and frequently barely aware of the wars conducted in their name, far from American shores, in regions about which they knew little. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gives us the first book-length, expert historical analysis of these wars. It examines the lessons and legacies of wars whose outcomes may not be clear for decades."--Back cover.

Why has the US so dramatically failed in Afghanistan since 2001? Dominant explanations have ignored the bureaucratic divisions and personality conflicts inside the US state. This book rectifies this weakness in commentary on Afghanistan by exploring the significant role of these divisions in the US’s difficulties in the country that meant the battle was virtually lost before it even began. The main objective of the book is to deepen readers understanding of the impact of bureaucratic politics on nation-building in Afghanistan, focusing primarily on the Bush Administration. It rejects the ’rational actor’ model, according to which the US functions as a coherent, monolithic agent. Instead, internal divisions within the foreign policy bureaucracy are explored, to build up a picture of the internal tensions and contradictions that bedevilled US nation-building efforts. The book also contributes to the vexed issue of whether or not the US should engage in nation-building at all, and if so under what conditions.

Since the end of the draft in the United States, the nation’s wars have been fought by all-volunteer forces, creating an enormous divide between the civilian public and its military. Recent wars have taken place during the information age, allowing cable news and the “new media” of the internet to change, sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis, the way wars are understood. As a result, a multitude of competing and often flawed narratives have emerged that, ultimately, merely explain events in terms of self-serving political and cultural perspectives. Author Caleb S. Cage, a veteran of the war in Iraq, brings a unique perspective to the understanding of how we talk about war. Why does the American public believe that those who served are somehow both heroes and victims, while the typical service member rarely embraces either identity? How does what happens on the front line get communicated to those back home, and what happens to that information as it travels? Is it possible that works of fiction are telling the most “real” versions of what is happening “over there”? War Narratives is a tightly packed and provocative book containing a series of connected essays on the many competing narratives—both fiction and nonfiction—that are used to explain recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, how those narratives are perceived through preexisting social, political, and literary lenses, and how they often fall short. As Cage points out, narratives are not merely the stories shared or even how they are told; these expressions reflect choices.

This book analyses the various ways counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is gendered. The book examines the US led war in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards, including the invasion, the population-centric counterinsurgency operations and the efforts to train a new Afghan military charged with securing the country when the US and NATO withdrew their combat forces in 2014. Through an analysis of key counterinsurgency texts and military memoirs, the book explores how gender and counterinsurgency are co-constitutive in numerous ways. It discusses the multiple military masculinities that counterinsurgency relies on, the discourse of ‘cultural sensitivity’, and the deployment of Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Gendering Counterinsurgency demonstrates how population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine and practice can be captured within a gendered dynamic of ‘killing and caring’ – reliant on physical violence, albeit mediated through ‘armed social work’. This simultaneously contradictory and complementary dynamic cannot be understood without recognising how the legitimation and the practice of this war relied on multiple gendered embodied performances of masculinities and femininities. Developing the concept of ‘embodied performativity’ this book shows how the clues to understanding counterinsurgency, as well as gendering war more broadly are found in war’s everyday gendered manifestations. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency warfare, gender politics, governmentality, biopolitics, critical war studies, and critical security studies in general.