Post by woodyz on Dec 4, 2014 15:08:21 GMT -7
I was reading the "best Books of 2014" list on NYT and ran across a title I had meant to share earlier in the year before I got side tracked.
I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for some insight into why our warriors are coming back with broken minds.
‘Redeployment,’ by Phil Klay
By DEXTER FILKINS MARCH 6, 2014
War is too weird a thing to make sense of when it’s actually happening. It’s not just the combat, which by its nature is unintelligible. Armed conflict so fundamentally alters the environment it takes hold of that no aspect of life escapes undistorted: not love, not friendship, not sleep, not trust, not conversation. In war, even boredom is strange.
And I was reminded of an earlier book along the same lines but related to my war.
This book is a must read. This book has been made into an entire college course for psychology majors.
This book will help you refine your BOB lists.
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. ”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Here is a pdf file of some of the selected pages so you can decide you want to read it or not.
peopleandstories.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/the-things-they-carried.pdf
I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for some insight into why our warriors are coming back with broken minds.
‘Redeployment,’ by Phil Klay
By DEXTER FILKINS MARCH 6, 2014
War is too weird a thing to make sense of when it’s actually happening. It’s not just the combat, which by its nature is unintelligible. Armed conflict so fundamentally alters the environment it takes hold of that no aspect of life escapes undistorted: not love, not friendship, not sleep, not trust, not conversation. In war, even boredom is strange.
And I was reminded of an earlier book along the same lines but related to my war.
This book is a must read. This book has been made into an entire college course for psychology majors.
This book will help you refine your BOB lists.
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. ”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Here is a pdf file of some of the selected pages so you can decide you want to read it or not.
peopleandstories.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/the-things-they-carried.pdf