The youth of Bedros Haroian prepared him for the life of a soldier. He grew up an orphan in a cold and half-destroyed house in a village of the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the 20th century. He grew up in a despised and impoverished Christian community in the Ottoman Empire, which was the Caliphate and operating under Shari'a law. Those beginnings made Haroian a revolutionary. When W.W. I breaks out, Haroian will find himself serving in four armies. The Ottoman Army conscripts him, and he joins with zeal to gain martial skills, and he provides one of the only descriptions of a survivor of the defeat at the Battle of Sarikamish. He later escapes to join the Imperial Russian Army to help fight for the Armenians surviving the Genocide. He ends up serving in the British Army in Batum (a Black Sea port), At the end, Bedros Haroian joins the French Foreign Legion's auxiliary unit of Armenian Legionnaires to defend the Armenian survivors in Cilicia (bordering the Mediterranean Sea). History and horror--those two words describe Haroian's experience as a soldier. His memoirs provide on-the-ground details and insights into historical battles, ones that increase our understanding beyond the limits of official reports on these battles.--Publisher.

When Canadian soldier Fred Doucette went to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a peacekeeper in 1995, he had a premonition that this tour of duty would be different from anything he had previously experienced. And it was. Doucette's tour quickly became an impossible task that took a huge toll on both the residents and his fellow peacekeepers. Trapped in thier beloved city, thousands of Sarajevans, perished, and yet, Doucette found a home in the midst of this hell. Billeted with a Bosnian family, he was offered a window into a Sarajevo that few outsiders saw. When the war ended, Doucette returned to Canada to face another battle, this one characterized by nightmares and brutal flashbacks. Traumatized, he had to face himself, his family, and his army once again, but now there was no turning away, no diversion in another foreign posting. Empty Casing is the riveting story of the making and unmaking of a soldier, and the growth of a man.

A rediscovered World War I masterpiece—one of the few memoirs about the Italian front—for fans of military history and All Quiet on the Western Front An infantryman’s “harrowing, moving, [and] occasionally comic” account of trench warfare on the alpine front seen in A Farewell to Arms (Times Literary Supplement). Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu’s memoir as an infantryman is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals in spare and detached prose the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy—the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu’s memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.

They Fought for Each Other presents a searing chronicle of the soldiers of Battalion 1-26 who confronted the worst neighborhood in Baghdad and lost more men than any battalion since the Vietnam War. Based on "Blood Brothers," the award-nominated series that ran in Army Times, this is the remarkable story of a courageous military unit that sacrificed their lives to change Adhamiya, Iraq from a lawless town where insurgents roamed freely, to a safe and secure neighborhood. Army Times writer Kelly Kennedy was embedded with Charlie Company in 2007, went on patrol with the soldiers and spent hours in combat support hospitals, leading to this riveting chronicle of an Army battalion that lost 31 soldiers in Iraq. During that period, one soldier threw himself on a grenade to save his friends, a well-liked first sergeant shot himself to death in front of his troops, and a platoon staged a mutiny. The men of Charlie 1-26 would earn at least 95 combat awards, including one soldier who would go home with three Purple Hearts and a lost dream. This is a timeless story of men at war and a heartbreaking account of American sacrifice in Iraq.

Sometimes you can't choose your own battles. A memoir of coming of age in Rhodesia explores the author's experiences as a young conscript caught up in the bush war of the late 1970s.

The moving memoir of one of the most senior-ranking combat physicians to have served on the battlefields of the second Iraq war.

“A frank, poignant memoir about an unlikely marriage, a tragic death in Iraq, and the soul-testing work of picking up the pieces” (People) in the tradition of such powerful bestsellers as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Carole Radziwill’s What Remains. Artis Henderson was a free-spirited young woman with dreams of traveling the world and one day becoming a writer. Marrying a conservative Texan soldier and becoming an Army wife was never part of her plan, but when she met Miles, Artis threw caution to the wind and moved with him to a series of Army bases in dusty Southern towns, far from the exotic future of her dreams. If this was true love, she was ready to embrace it. But when Miles was training and Artis was left alone, she experienced feelings of isolation and anxiety. It did not take long for a wife’s worst fears to come true. On November 6, 2006, the Apache helicopter carrying Miles crashed in Iraq, leaving twenty-six-year-old Artis—in official military terms—an “unremarried widow.” In this memoir Artis recounts not only the unlikely love story she shared with Miles and her unfathomable recovery in the wake of his death—from the dark hours following the military notification to the first fumbling attempts at new love—but also reveals how Miles’s death mirrored her own father’s, in a plane crash that Artis survived when she was five years old and that left her own mother a young widow. Unremarried Widow is “a powerful look at mourning as a military wife….You can finish it in a day and find yourself haunted weeks later” (The New York Times Book Review).