KANDAK

Author: Patrick Hennessey
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141966270
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 435

Book Description
From the author of the top ten bestseller The Junior Officers' Reading Club. When Patrick Hennessey returned home from Afghanistan, battle-worn, exhilarated, unsure if he'd see anything like it in his life again, he left behind him bands of friendship forged in the heat of the moment between living and dying. The comrades he left furthest behind were Qiam, Syed and Majhib. They are still there in the dust and heat of Helmand, soldiers fighting for their homeland. KANDAK is the story of how these lasting bonds were made. Written in the spare and lucid prose of Junior Officers' Reading Club, Patrick Hennessey tells of their comically bad first meetings, the mutual suspicion, incomprehension and cultural divides that characterise early interactions between British and Afghan soldiers, to the moments under fire when those divides can, sometimes, cross chaos and culture shocks to turn into brotherhood. An account of friendship and loss, of warriors and soldiers, KANDAK explores the reasons men pick up the sword, and how in the intensity of battle, unlikely alliances can be formed.

The Junior Officers' Reading Club

Author: Patrick Hennessey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101460059
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Hailed as a classic of war writing in the U.K., The Junior Officers' Reading Club is a revelatory first-hand account of a young enlistee's profound coming of age. Attempting to stave off the tedium and pressures of army life in the Iraqi desert by losing themselves in the dusty paperbacks on the transit-camp bookshelves, Hennessey and a handful of his pals from military academy form the Junior Officers' Reading Club. By the time he reaches Afghanistan and the rest of the club are scattered across the Middle East, they are no longer cheerfully overconfident young recruits, hungering for action and glory. Hennessey captures how boys grow into men amid the frenetic, sometimes exhilarating violence, frequent boredom, and almost overwhelming responsibilities that frame a soldier's experience and the way we fight today. Watch a Video

Farishta

Author: Patricia McArdle
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101515317
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
An American diplomat is forced to confront the devastation of her past when she is assigned to remote northern Afghanistan. Twenty-one years ago, diplomat Angela Morgan witnessed the death of her husband during the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Devastated by her loss, she fled back to America, where she hid in the backwaters of the State Department and avoided the high-profile postings that would advance her career. Now, with that career about to dead-end and no true connections at home, she must take the one assignment available-at a remote British army outpost in northern Afghanistan. Unwelcome among the soldiers and unaccepted by the local government and warlords, Angela has to fight to earn the respect of her colleagues, especially the enigmatic Mark Davies, a British major who is by turns her staunchest ally and her fiercest critic. Frustrated at her inability to contribute to the nation's reconstruction, Angela slips out of camp disguised in a burka to provide aid to the refugees in the war-torn region. She becomes their farishta, or "angel," in the local Dari language-and discovers a new purpose for her life, a way to finally put her grief behind her. Drawing on the experiences of the author as a diplomat in Afghanistan, Farishta is a deeply moving and fast-paced story of a woman struggling to move beyond a past trauma, and finding a new community, a new love, and a new sense of self in the process.

Moonlight Hotel

Author: Scott Anderson
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307387038
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
David Richards is a mid-level diplomat assigned to the sleepy, backwater Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar in 1983. He spends his days on minor development projects and his nights seducing ambassador’s wives. But when news of a tribal skirmish reaches the capital, Richards soon finds himself embroiled in a civil war as Colonel Munn, a pint-sized, blustery Texan assigned to Kutar, organizes a preemptive offensive against the rebellious forces. After Munn is immediately routed and the rebellion seizes control of the capitol, Richards holes up in the ramshackle Moonlight Hotel with fellow expatriates, determined to ride out the conflict despite the growing chaos and destruction that are heading towards them. This is a stunning and thrilling novel of war and survival from an acclaimed war correspondent. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia.

Why We Fight

Author: Mike Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 178738036X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
"Why are we willing to die for our countries? How can ideology persuade someone to blow themselves up? When we go to war, morality, religion and ideology often take the blame. But Mike Martin boldly argues that the opposite is true: rather than driving violence, these things help to reduce it. While we resort to ideas and values to justify or interpret warfare, something else is really propelling us towards conflict: our subconscious desires, shaped by millions of years of evolution.

One Bullet Away

Author: Nathaniel Fick
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0618773436
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
An ex-Marine captain shares his story of fighting in a recon battalion in both Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning with his brutal training on Quantico Island and following his progress through various training sessions and, ultimately, conflict in the deadliest conflicts since the Vietnam War.

The Unforgiving Minute

Author: Craig M. Mullaney
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440686270
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
“The Unforgiving Minute is one of the most compelling memoirs yet to emerge from America's 9/11 era. Craig Mullaney has given us an unusually honest, funny, accessible, and vivid account of a soldier's coming of age. This is more than a soldier's story; it is a work of literature." —Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens "One of the most thoughtful and honest accounts ever written by a young Army officer confronting all the tests of life." —Bob Woodward In this surprise bestseller, West Point grad, Rhodes scholar, Airborne Ranger, and U. S. Army Captain Craig Mullaney recounts his unparalleled education and the hard lessons that only war can teach. While stationed in Afghanistan, a deadly firefight with al-Qaeda leads to the loss of one of his soldiers. Years later, after that excruciating experience, he returns to the United States to teach future officers at the Naval Academy. Written with unflinching honesty, this is an unforgettable portrait of a young soldier grappling with the weight of war while coming to terms with what it means to be a man.

Losing Small Wars

Author: Frank Ledwidge
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300229097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
This new edition of Frank Ledwidge’s eye-opening analysis of British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan unpicks the causes and enormous costs of military failure. Updated throughout, and with fresh chapters assessing and enumerating the overall military performance since 2011—including Libya, ISIS, and the Chilcot findings—Ledwidge shows how lessons continue to go unlearned. “A brave and important book; essential reading for anyone wanting insights into the dysfunction within the British military today, and the consequences this has on the lives of innocent civilians caught up in war.”—Times Literary Supplement

Dig

Author: A.S. King
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101994932
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
Winner of the Michael L. Printz Medal ★“King’s narrative concerns are racism, patriarchy, colonialism, white privilege, and the ingrained systems that perpetuate them. . . . [Dig] will speak profoundly to a generation of young people who are waking up to the societal sins of the past and working toward a more equitable future.”—Horn Book, starred review “I’ve never understood white people who can’t admit they’re white. I mean, white isn’t just a color. And maybe that’s the problem for them. White is a passport. It’s a ticket.” Five estranged cousins are lost in a maze of their family’s tangled secrets. Their grandparents, former potato farmers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings, managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now they sit atop a million-dollar bank account—wealth they’ve refused to pass on to their adult children or their five teenage grandchildren. “Because we want them to thrive,” Marla always says. But for the Hemmings cousins, “thriving” feels a lot like slowly dying of a poison they started taking the moment they were born. As the rot beneath the surface of the Hemmings’ white suburban respectability destroys the family from within, the cousins find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name. With her inimitable surrealism, award winner A.S. King exposes how a toxic culture of polite white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can dig its way out.

Breakfast with the Dirt Cult

Author: Samuel Finlay
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615622996
Category : Afghan War, 2001-
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
"I'm going to make a pinkie-swear with you right here and now, Tom Walton; when, not if, you return from Afghanistan, you must come up here and I will have a mad passionate affair with you..." With this proposal, Thomas Walton, an infantry soldier in Alpha Company, Second Platoon, arrives at the threshold of events that will change his life forever. Breakfast with the Dirt Cult chronicles the days of love and war in the life of Tom Walton. Torn between a beautiful, bibliophilic, Canadian ex-stripper and the hunt for Al-Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan, Walton finds himself forced to grapple with being a young man in the days of modernity. While Breakfast with the Dirt Cult has been written as a novel, it is based on a true story. The names have been changed and the chronology has been condensed for the sake of editing.