Tag: war

Kovalenko’s choice? Facing mortars on a daily basis or exposing your children to the after-effects of Chernobyl.

I interviewed everyone present in the tactical operations center during a routine airstrike in Helmand Province. Without exception they believe themselves to be doing the right thing.

“Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it.”

Steve Edwards searches for the hidden truths in the public and private sacrifices his granddad made serving in World War II.

How two exiled Sufi musicians returned to make traditional music in postwar Kabul, Afghanistan.

In the first war, Joseph Gray used his art to reveal his fellow soldiers. In the next war, he used it to hide them.

How during a brutal, 25-year civil war in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers failed the women soldiers who sacrificed everything to fight for a sovereign state for the Tamil minority.

Superheroes they used to stick up for the underdog and punch a lot of Nazis. Now, they fight villains who look a lot like themselves. Who are the baddies now?

For years, historians have blamed King Leopold of Belgium. But did they fall for Allied propaganda?

The Mosul University Library, once home to centuries-old books and documents, is rebuilding after ISIS destroyed it.

Vietnam Veteran Ray Cocks, who’d eagerly enlisted in 1967, was forever changed by the realities of war.

When Canadians privately sponsor a Syrian refugee family, the agreement lasts one year. What happens at month 13?

Des Kappel is the toponymist in charge of naming the 90,000 remaining land features and lakes in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Kappel’s work is often an emotional tour through history as he collects letters and photos of war casualties for his database.

In the Village Voice, Aleksandar Hemon explores the “unreality” of a Trump presidency, likening this era of American history to the start of the war in Bosnia in 1992, and calling for new literature that doesn’t shy away from the conflicts and destruction ahead.

The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other […]

Architect Maya Lin was a senior at Yale when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a 2000 essay for the New York Review of Books—which she began writing around the memorial’s completion in fall 1982 and then put aside for nearly two decades—she reflects on how she came to enter in the competition, and the […]

In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.

After the First World War, family and friends said that sometimes, boys came back from overseas “not right in the head.” Nearly 100 years later, the American military is only just starting to understand the effects of bomb blasts on soldiers’ brains and the prescience of those casual observations. Caroline Alexander reports in National Geographic […]

In The Atlantic in 2014, James Fallows examined how Americans and political leaders became so disconnected from those who serve in the military—and the consequences of that disconnect: If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long […]

And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures silhouetted against the white glare of the […]

Ms. Triplett’s pension, small as it is, stands as a reminder that war’s bills don’t stop coming when the guns fall silent. The VA is still paying benefits to 16 widows and children of veterans from the 1898 Spanish-American War. The last U.S. World War I veteran died in 2011. But 4,038 widows, sons and […]

“You need to talk, let me know.”

This week, we’re excited to feature Janet Reitman, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. “Baghdad Follies” is Reitman’s 2004 story on what it was like to be a war correspondent in Iraq. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the war, Reitman reflects on her early […]

How the U.S. drone program became central to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The president has presided over 268 covert drone strikes, five times what George W. Bush ordered: But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables […]

Photojournalist Tyler Hicks on his last trip into Syria with New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, who later died: The ammunition seemed evidence of the risk we were taking — a risk we did not shoulder lightly. Anthony, who passionately documented the eruptions in the Arab world from Iraq to Libya for The New York Times, felt it […]

Africa is changing—but when it comes to conflict, the battles are smaller, messier and not necessarily driven by a specific purpose: This is the story of conflict in Africa these days. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, […]

A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland: Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were […]

U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them: The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from […]