This grimly realistic depiction of army life follows a trio of idealists as they contend with the regimentation, violence, and boredom of military service. Incited past the point of endurance, the soldiers respond with rancor and murderous rage. This powerful exploration of warfare's dehumanizing effects remains chillingly contemporary.

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘Soldiers Three and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling’. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Kipling includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily. eBook features: * The complete unabridged text of ‘Soldiers Three and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Kipling’s works * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles

Throughout history, battlefields have placed a soldier's instinct for self-preservation in direct opposition to the army's insistence that he do his duty and put himself in harm's way. Enduring Battle looks beyond advances in weaponry to examine changes in warfare at the very personal level. Drawing on the combat experiences of American soldiers in three widely separated wars-the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II-Christopher Hamner explores why soldiers fight in the face of terrifying lethal threats and how they manage to suppress their fears, stifle their instincts, and marshal the will to kill other humans. Hamner contrasts the experience of infantry combat on the ground in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when soldiers marched shoulder-to-shoulder in linear formations, with the experiences of dispersed infantrymen of the mid-twentieth century. Earlier battlefields prized soldiers who could behave as stoic automatons; the modern dispersed battlefield required soldiers who could act autonomously. As the range and power of weapons removed enemies from view, combat became increasingly depersonalized, and soldiers became more isolated from their comrades and even imagined that the enemy was targeting them personally. What's more, battles lengthened so that exchanges of fire that lasted an hour during the Revolutionary War became round-the-clock by World War II. The book's coverage of training and leadership explores the ways in which military systems have attempted to deal with the problem of soldiers' fear in battle and contrasts leadership in the linear and dispersed tactical systems. Chapters on weapons and comradeship then discuss soldiers' experiences in battle and the relationships that informed and shaped those experiences. Hamner highlights the ways in which the "band of brothers" phenomenon functioned differently in the three wars and shows that training, conditioning, leadership, and other factors affect behavior much more than political ideology. He also shows how techniques to motivate soldiers evolved, from the linear system's penalties for not fighting to modern efforts to convince soldiers that participation in combat would actually maximize their own chances for survival. Examining why soldiers continue to fight when their strong instinct is to flee, Enduring Battle challenges long-standing notions that high ideals and small unit bonds provide sufficient explanation for their behavior. Offering an innovative way to analyze the factors that enable soldiers to face the prospect of death or debilitating wounds, it expands our understanding of the evolving nature of warfare and its warriors.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).

A 2020 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year A 2020 Children's Book Council Notable Social Studies Book for Young People Over a quarter million underage British boys fought on the Allied front lines of the Great War, but not all of them fought on the battlefield—some fought beneath it, as revealed in this middle-grade historical adventure about a deadly underground mission. Secret Soldiers follows the journey of Thomas, a thirteen-year-old coal miner, who lies about his age to join the Claykickers, a specialized crew of soldiers known as “tunnelers,” in hopes of finding his missing older brother. Thomas works in the tunnels of the Western Front alongside three other soldier boys whose constant bickering and inexperience in mining may prove more lethal than the enemy digging toward them. But as they burrow deeper beneath the battlefield, the boys discover the men they hope to become and forge a bond of brotherhood. Secret Soldiers is another stunning story of strength, perseverance, and love from Keely Hutton. This title has common core connections.

What explains differences in soldier participation in violence during irregular war? How do ordinary men become professional wielders of force, and when does this transformation falter or fail? Regular Soldiers, Irregular War presents a theoretical framework for understanding the various forms of behavior in which soldiers engage during counterinsurgency campaigns—compliance and shirking, abuse and restraint, as well as the creation of new violent practices. Through an in-depth study of the Israeli Defense Forces' repression of the Second Palestinian Intifada of 2000–2005, including in-depth interviews with and a survey of former combatants, Devorah Manekin examines how soldiers come both to unleash and to curb violence against civilians in a counterinsurgency campaign. Manekin argues that variation in soldiers' behavior is best explained by the effectiveness of the control mechanisms put in place to ensure combatant violence reflects the strategies and preferences of military elites, primarily at the small-unit level. Furthermore, she develops and analyzes soldier participation in three categories of violence: strategic violence authorized by military elites; opportunistic or unauthorized violence; and "entrepreneurial violence"—violence initiated from below to advance organizational aims when leaders are ambiguous about what will best serve those aims. By going inside military field units and exploring their patterns of command and control, Regular Soldiers, Irregular War, sheds new light on the dynamics of violence and restraint in counterinsurgency.