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Places and Names - On War, Revolution, and Returning (Paperback)
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Places and Names - On War, Revolution, and Returning (Paperback)
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Loot Price R509
Discovery Miles 5 090
Expected to ship within 10 - 17 working days
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One of NPR's Best Books of 2019 "Lyrical . . . A thoughtful
perspective on America's role overseas." -Washington Post From a
decorated Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist, an
astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost
of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. "War hath determined
us." -John Milton, Paradise Lost Toward the beginning of Places and
Names, Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey,
across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for
al-Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are
murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during
the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he
takes a risk by revealing to him that in fact he was a Marine
special operation officer. Ackerman then draws the shape of the
Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time
adversary quickly joins him in the game of filling in the map with
the names and dates of places where they saw fighting during the
war. They had shadowed each other for some time, it turned out, a
realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy. The
rest of Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir is in a way an
answer to the question of why he came to that refugee camp, and
what he hoped to find there. By moving back and forth between his
recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and its
environs and his deeper past in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a
work of remarkable atmospheric pressurization. Ackerman shares
vivid and powerful stories of his own experiences in combat,
culminating in the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah, the
most intense urban combat for the Marines since Hue in Vietnam,
where Ackerman's actions leading a rifle platoon saw him awarded
the Silver Star. He weaves these stories into the latticework of a
masterful larger reckoning with contemporary geopolitics through
his vantage as a journalist in Istanbul and with the human extremes
of both bravery and horror. At once an intensely personal story
about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the
larger meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the
region, and the world, Places and Names bids fair to take its place
among our greatest books about modern war.
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