A decade after the Crimean War, the telegraph was ubiquitous enough to allow the U.S. public to read reports of the Civil War a day or two after battles happened. Like Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War and Sebastian Junger’s War, Verini’s book is a personal, keenly observed, deftly written account of time spent with Iraqi and Kurdish forces. “Experientially, war is mainly sound,” Verini writes. “In the news, in a movie, you see a war, but once amid a war, you mostly hear it. But the U.S. rebuilt and armed the Iraqi military, Verini thought, and sent its soldiers to fight beside them.

Source: National Post October 22, 2019 16:07 UTC