During World War I, Harry Lambert reluctantly finds himself fighting on Europe's Western Front. Watching his friends die around him, Harry can't bear the thought of dying before ever having truly known love. Making a life-changing decision, he deserts, walking away from the battlefield into an unfamiliar and hostile French countryside. Desperately trying to avoid capture, he meets Colombe, a stoic farm-wife bowed by hard work and tragedy, who will risk everything to save his life.
This book depicts the author's military experiences during the Vietnam Era, first as an ROTC cadet at the University of Notre Dame and finally as an Army veteran teaching in Madison, Wisconsin, focusing upon Schwartz's experience at West Point, its cadets, officer corps and system of education.
2016 Santa Fe literary awards - finalist 2016 Next Generation Indie Book awards - finalist 2016 USA Best Book Awards - finalist in the memoir category 2016 Author Awards, 2nd place in the memoir category A SheKnows.com and Mind Body and Green Must-Read! Featured in Buzzfeed, Working Mother Magazine, The Reading Room, Brit and Co., Writer's Digest, Style, Huffington Post, Jewish Book Council, and Jewish Values Center. At age nineteen, Dorit Sasson, a dual American-Israeli citizen, was trying to make the status quo work as a college student—until she realized that if she didn’t distance herself from her neurotic, worrywart of a mother, she would become just like her. Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces is Sasson’s story of how she dropped out of college and volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces in an effort to change her life—and how, in stepping out of her comfort zone and into a war zone, she discovered courage and faith she didn’t know she was capable of.
"I was born in a log cabin just like Abe Lincoln, except our cabin was a rental." Starting with this account of his humble origins, Manny Garcia, who describes himself as "a left-handed, rather contrary Mestizo-American," has written a memoir that begins in late 1947 in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado and takes him to Utah and a stint as a Mormon and ultimately to Vietnam. In late 1965, a cocky, naive, alienated teen-ager, Garcia joined the army almost accidentally, enlisting for three years. At eighteen he became an Airborne Ranger, a combat infantryman with the crack First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. His book shows you the war from the point man position, up close and personal, at eye level. "I returned to the body and checked for booby traps. I noticed the guerilla's small bare leathery feet. I rolled the body over and realized the corpse at my feet was an old woman. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a bun, like how my grandmother used to wear her own hair. This was my first kill. I killed a woman before I made love to one. I killed a woman before I was old enough to vote. I killed a woman before I bought my first car. I killed a woman and I was an Eagle Scout. I killed a woman while I was on probation to the Juvenile Court. I killed a woman before I knew she was a woman. I killed a woman while working for the United States Army in South Vietnam. I had killed before I had lived. The afternoon in the jungle was bright and hot. I stood there sweating, bewildered, dumfounded, and completely absorbed by the power."--from An Accidental Soldier "A valuable contribution to the growing list of Viet Nam narratives told from communities whose histories have yet to be fully recognized."--Jorge Mariscal, University of California, San Diego
In the tradition of Michael Herr's Dispatches, a National Guardsman's account of the war in Iraq. John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition, willingly exchanging one weekend a month and two weeks a year for a free education. But in Autumn 2002, one semester short of graduating and newly married—in fact, on his honeymoon—he was called to active duty and sent to the front lines in Iraq. Crawford and his unit spent months upon months patrolling the streets of Baghdad, occupying a hostile city. During the breaks between patrols, Crawford began recording what he and his fellow soldiers witnessed and experienced. Those stories became The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell—a haunting and powerful, compellingly honest book that imparts the on-the-ground reality of waging the war in Iraq, and marks as the introduction of a mighty literary voice forged in the most intense of circumstances.
When nineteen-year-old Dorit Sasson realized she had no choice but to distance herself from her neurotic, worrywart of a mother in order to become her own person, she volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces--and found her path to freedom.
The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of North Woods and The Piano Tuner is "a dream of a novel...part mystery, part war story, part romance" (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See). Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever. From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone. "The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success." —Anthony Marra, New York Times Book Review
Every family has its secrets, and the Lamberts have Uncle Harry, who fought in World War I but never came home from France. Each Lambert relative now clings to a different story. Harry died a hero's death on the battlefield . Harry married a sweet French girl. Harry drowned in the mud in Gallipoli. Harry was a coward who ran from the enemy. As his great niece Julie struggles to properly research Harry's fate, she sees how easily history can be rewritten. Slowly she uncovers an awkward boy growing up in turn-of-the-century Australia, an obedient son caring for his aging mother, and finally a 40-year-old bachelor heading off to the European theater as a reluctant soldier. Eventually she finds evidence that Harry was called to the front--after serving in a post out of harm's way--and on the way he made a decision that changed the rest of his life.
Andy O'Meara, Jr., a sensitive boy with dreams of studying law at Yale, was thrust by a domineering father into the hard world of West Point. At the academy, O'Meara's sensitivity became liability. To survive he learned to hide his feelings as he had in an abusive home.
