The first memoir by a USS Arizona survivor... Donald Stratton, one of the battleship's five living heroes, delivers a "powerful" and "intimate" eyewitness account of Pearl Harbor and his unforgettable return to the fight.

The United States is embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan -- wars that seem as far from Americans' understanding as the countries are distant from our shores. With American Veterans on War, Elise Forbes Tripp brings our current wars and their predecessors home in the words of 55 veterans aged 20 to 90. The veterans raise questions about when wars are worth fighting, what missions can and can't be won, and the costs and benefits of US intervention,...

"From journalist Robert Timberg, a memoir of the struggle to reclaim his life after being severely burned as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go when his vehicle struck a Viet Cong land mine, resulting in third-degree burns of his face and much of his body. He survived, barely, then began the arduous battle back, determined...

"Between 1819 and 1845, as veterans of the Revolutionary War were filing applications to receive pensions for their service, the government was surprised to learn that many of the soldiers were not men, but boys, many of whom were under the age of sixteen, and some even as young as nine. In Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution, Caroline Cox reconstructs the lives and stories of this young subset of early American soldiers, focusing on how these...

The wives of veterans who served in Charlie Company, a unit that fought in the Vietnam War, describe the drastic changes that occurred in their husbands and in their marriage as their families struggled to overcome the traumas of the war.

This book is a collection of articles that first appeared on the Head Space and Timing blog, which can be found at veteranmentalhealth.com . The collected and edited articles, with additional content, have been consolidated into eight themes: Raising Awareness about the Psychological Impact of Military Service ; Developing Personal Awareness of the Need for Veteran Mental Health ; Developing Resilience to Recover ; Developing Skills to Apply to...

"In Iraq, as a combat physician and officer, Jon Kerstetter balanced two impossibly conflicting imperatives - to heal and to kill. When he suffered an injury and then a stroke during his third tour, he wound up back home in Iowa, no longer able to be either a doctor or a soldier. In this gorgeous memoir that moves from his impoverished upbringing on an Oneida reservation, to his harrowing stints as a volunteer medic in Kosovo and Bosnia, through the...

A decade ago, Special Forces warrior Jason Morgan parachuted into the Central American jungle on an anti-narcotics raid. He’d served with the famous Night Stalkers on countless such missions. This one turned out very different. Months later, he regained consciousness in a US military hospital, with no memory of how he’d gotten there. The first words he heard were from his surgeon telling him he would never walk again. The determined soldier responded:...

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front...

The Iraq War veteran traces her impoverished childhood, her decision to join the Army, the months spent recovering from the RPG attack that shot down her helicopter and nearly took her life, and her subsequent mission of serving in elected office.