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A riveting collection of thirty-eight narratives by American soldiers serving in Afghanistan,Outside the Wireoffers a powerful evocation of everyday life in a war zone. Christine Dumaine Leche-a writing instructor who left her home and family to teach at Bagram Air Base and a forward operating base near the volatile Afghan-Pakistani border-encouraged these deeply personal reflections, which demonstrate the power of writing to battle the most traumatic of experiences. The soldiers whose words fill this book often met for class with Leche under extreme circumstances and in challenging conditions, some having just returned from dangerous combat missions, others having spent the day in firefights, endured hours in the bitter cold of an open guard tower, or suffered a difficult phone conversation with a spouse back home. Some choose to record momentous events from childhood or civilian life-events that motivated them to join the military or that haunt them as adults. Others capture the immediacy of the battlefield and the emotional and psychological explosions that followed. These soldiers write through the senses and from the soul, grappling with the impact of moral complexity, fear, homesickness, boredom, and despair. We each, writes Leche, require witnesses to the narratives of our lives.Outside the Wirecreates that opportunity for us as readers to bear witness to the men and women who carry the weight of war for us all.

Nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers are deployed to Afghanistan, fighting the longest war in the nation's history. But what do Americans know about the land where this conflict is taking place? Many have come to have a grasp of the people, history, and geography of Iraq, but Afghanistan remains a mystery. Originally published by the U.S. Army to provide an overview of the country's terrain, ethnic groups, and history for American troops and now updated and expanded for the general public,Afghanistan Declassifiedfills in these gaps. Historian Brian Glyn Williams, who has traveled to Afghanistan frequently over the past decade, provides essential background to the war, tracing the rise, fall, and reemergence of the Taliban. Special sections deal with topics such as the CIA's Predator drone campaign in the Pakistani tribal zones, the spread of suicide bombing from Iraq to the Afghan theater of operations, and comparisons between the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan. To Williams, a historian of Central Asia, Afghanistan is not merely a theater in the war on terror. It is a primeval, exciting, and beautiful land; not only a place of danger and turmoil but also one of hospitable villagers and stunning landscapes, of great cultural diversity and richness. Williams brings the country to life through his own travel experiences-from living with Northern Alliance Uzbek warlords to working on a major NATO base. National heroes are introduced, Afghanistan's varied ethnic groups are explored, key battles-both ancient and current-are retold, and this land that many see as only a frightening setting for prolonged war emerges in three dimensions.

While women are officially barred from combat in the American armed services, in the current war, where there are no front lines, the ban on combat is virtually meaningless. More than in any previous conflict in our history, American women are engaging with the enemy, suffering injuries, and even sacrificing their lives in the line of duty. When Janey Comes Marching Home juxtaposes forty-eight photographs by Sascha Pflaeging with oral histories collected by Laura Browder to provide a dramatic portrait of women at war. Women from all five branches of the military share their stories here - stories that are by turns moving, comic, thought-provoking, and profound. Seeing their faces in stunning color photographic portraits and reading what they have to say about loss, comradeship, conflict, and hard choices will change the ways we think about women and war. Serving in a combat zone is an all-encompassing experience that is transformative, life-defining, and difficult to leave behind. By coming face-to-face with women veterans, we who are outside that world can begin to get a sense of how the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shaped their lives and how their stories may ripple out and influence the experiences of all American women. The book accompanies a photography exhibit of the same name opening May 1, 2010, at the Women in Military Service to America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, and continuing to travel around the country through 2011.

Douglas Grindle provides a firsthand account of how the war in Afghanistan was won in a rural district south of Kandahar City and how the newly created peace slipped away when vital resources failed to materialize and the United States headed for the exit.By placing the reader at the heart of the American counterinsurgency effort, Grindle reveals little-known incidents, including the failure of expensive aid programs to target local needs, the slow throttling of local government as official funds failed to reach the districts, and the United States' inexplicable failure to empower the Afghan local officials even after they succeeded in bringing the people onto their side. Grindle presents the side of the hard-working Afghans who won the war and expresses what they really thought of the U.S. military and its decisions. Written by a former field officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, this story of dashed hopes and missed opportunities details how America's desire to leave the war behind ultimately overshadowed its desire to sustain victory.

The Strong Gray Line profiles members of the West Point class of 2004 who fought and died in service to their country. Alongside these commemorative stories, surviving members describe some of the most brutal combat of the Iraq and Afghanistan war in vivid and stirring vignettes.

This unique volume presents the experience of 37 U.S. military nurses sent to the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of war to care for the injured and dying. The personal and professional challenges they faced, the difficulties they endured, the dangers they overcame, and the consequences they grappled with are vividly described from deployment to discharge. In mobile surgical field hospitals and fast-forward teams, detainee care centers, base and city hospitals, medevac aircraft, and aeromedical staging units, these nurses cared for their patients with compassion, acumen, and inventiveness. And when they returned home, they dealt with their experience as they could. The text is divided into thematic chapters on essential issues: how the nurses separated from their families and the uncertainties they faced in doing so; their response to horrific injuries that combatants, civilians and children suffered; working and living in Iraq and Afghanistan for extended periods; personal health issues; and what it meant to care for enemy insurgents and detainees. Also discussed is how the experience enhanced their clinical skills, why their adjustment to civilian life was so difficult, and how the war changed them as nurses, citizens, and people.

The Dust of Kandahar represents a unique contribution to USNI's growing number of books on the conflict in Afghanistan, largely because it views events primarily from a civilian perspective. Attached to the Third Infantry Division based in Kandahar during its year-long deployment in southern Afghanistan, the author served as a link between the Embassy in Kabul and military leaders in Regional Command-South (RC-South). He was also heavily involved in outreach aimed at Afghan government officials, tribal and religious leaders and others during a time of transition marked by a significant drawdown in the size of the international military presence across the country. Few such books view the war through a civilian lens and even fewer forego the usual political or policy analysis to instead focus on the human dimensions of it. By taking this approach, the author advances the USNI's mission of presenting alternative perspectives, in this case one that adopts a literary approach to advance a deeper professional understanding of the conflict. In effect, it complements the various military memoirs by offering a civilian perspective; and it complements the more detailed military, political and policy assessments by examining the interior lives of those directly involved, reflecting instead on the human costs of war. Emerging as one of the most important post 9/11 battle zones, US engagement in Afghanistan has become an important part of the country's national defense strategy over the last decade and a half. While the international presence has significantly diminished during the last couple of years, Afghanistan remains an area of interest and concern. Even as the United States faces growing challenges in other parts of the world, a better appreciation for “lessons learned\" from the Afghan experience will help further our own approach to global issues while also strengthening the national defense. Finally, the role of civilians in insurgencies and stabilization programs is often not very well understood; this book will help fill that gap.

War Comes to Garmser offers a fresh, original perspective on the war in Afghanistan, one that will redefine how we look at Afghanistan and at modern war in general. The author, who spent nearly two years in Garmser, a community in war-torn Helmand province, tells the story of this one small place through the jihad, the rise and fall of Taliban regimes, and American and British surge. Based on his conversations with hundreds of Afghans, including government officials, tribal leaders, religious leaders, and over forty Taliban, and drawing on extensive primary source material, Malkasian takes readers into the world of the Afghans.

Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan describe, in their own words, the crimes of war they witnessed.