Acclaimed New York Times journalist and author Chris Hedges offers a critical — and fascinating — lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself.

Hedges poses dozens of questions that young soldiers might ask about combat, and then answers them by quoting from medical and psychological studies.

• What are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war?

• What does it feel like to get shot?

• What do artillery shells do to you?

• What is the most painful way to get wounded?

• Will I be afraid?

• What could happen to me in a nuclear attack?

• What does it feel like to kill someone?

• Can I withstand torture?

• What are the long-term consequences of combat stress?

• What will happen to my body after I die?

This profound and devastating portrayal of the horrors to which we subject our armed forces stands as a ringing indictment of the glorification of war and the concealment of its barbarity.

"'This book is a manual on war. There is no rhetoric. There are very few adjectives,' Hedges proclaims in his introduction to this graphic primer. Framed as a question-and-answer manual for GIs, not 'every person,' the book gives perfunctory information about military social life, pay, housing and housekeeping (a 'central latrine will be established for multiple camps'). But the bulk of it is concerned with battlefield carnage, madness and pathos. A gristly chapter on 'Weapons and Wounds' details the bodily effects of artillery shells, incendiaries and several types of bullets. Questions like 'What does it feel like to kill someone?' (exhilaration, then remorse) and sections on post-traumatic stress disorder and flashbacks probe the psychic wounds of war. A chapter on 'Dying' covers topics like 'Will I be frozen in the position in which I die?' ('You can be straightened out after rigor mortis has set') and 'What will my last words be?' ('Many call for their mothers'). War correspondent Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (whose introductory paragraphs look a lot like their counterparts in this volume), presents this anxiety-provoking information as a grimly factual account of the true face of war — culled from 'medical, psychological, and military studies' — that America shies away from in favor of sanitized myths of glory and heroism. He fails to note that depictions of gore, mayhem, psychological trauma and flashbacks have become staples of Hollywood's treatment of war even as such experiences have become less common in America's high-tech, casualty-averse military. Americans, soldiers and civilians both, could use a clear-eyed analysis of modern warfare, but this limited treatment doesn't yet provide one." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Neither jingoistic nor pacifist, the book is about the moral authority of information, as it applies to the present and future nature of war." The New York Times

Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-162) and index.

Chris Hedges has been a foreign correspondent for fifteen years. He joined the staff of The New York Times in 1990 and previously worked for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio. He holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a master of divinity from Harvard University. He is lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Hedges was a member of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York City.