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Cargando... Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returningpor Elliot Ackerman
THE WAR ROOM (733) Cargando...
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"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. Toward the beginning of [this book], 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 operations 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 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 questions 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 astonishing 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 fighting 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 book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the deeper 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."--Dust jacket. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)956.7044History and Geography Asia Middle East IraqClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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This book skips around from his experiences to his return, now living in Turkey and revisiting places he fought, friends he met from both sides. We hear his views and others as well. The rise of different groups such as ISIS were formed due to power vacuums, in Iraq the downfall of Sadaam. That many of those who fought in these wars only to return after their enlistment has ended he explains as follows,
"That so many of us wen to war in this part of the world, only to return, send no surprise. For some of us,the wars have gone on so long that we lack context for life outside of them."
" This isn't a cause, although it can be. This isnt a particular war, but it's often that too. If I were to describe it, I'd say it's an experience so large that you sink to insignificance in it's presence. And that's how you get lost in it."
He explains PTSD, giving a different interpretation that one I thought I understood, to one that the way he tells it makes perfect sense. The story on Berghoff and the hardships of those who are trying to escape Syria. An interesting read for those who want a better understanding of the varied situations in the Middle East. ( )