Hearts Of Soldiers

From Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart comes the extraordinary story of American hero Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley security director and a veteran of Vietnam and the British colonial wars in Rhodesia, who lost his life on September 11. When Rick Rescorla got home from Vietnam, he tried to put combat and death behind him, but he never could entirely. From the day he joined the British Army to fight a colonial war in Rhodesia, where he met American Special Forces’ officer Dan Hill who would become his best friend, to the day he fell in love with Susan, everything in his remarkable life was preparing him for an act of generosity that would transcend all that went before. Heart of a Soldier is a story of bravery under fire, of loyalty to one’s comrades, of the miracle of finding happiness late in life. Everything about Rick’s life came together on September 11. In charge of security for Morgan Stanley, he successfully got all its 2,700 men and women out of the south tower of the World Trade Center. Then, thinking perhaps of soldiers he’d held as they died, as well as the woman he loved, he went back one last time to search for stragglers. Heart of a Soldier is a story that inspires, offers hope, and helps heal even the deepest wounds.

The commanding officer of an infantry battalion in Vietnam in 1969 recounts how he took over a demoralized unit of ordinary draftees and turned it into an elite fighting force, and describes its accomplishments.

Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life. West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

“Riveting. . . a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.”—New York Times Book Review This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as “the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’s so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring a chronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heart platoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, over their year-long tour of duty, into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would perpetrate one of the most heinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed during the Iraq War—the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-blooded execution of her and her family. Three other 1st Platoon soldiers would be overrun at a remote outpost—one killed immediately and two taken from the scene, their mutilated corpses found days later booby-trapped with explosives. Black Hearts is an unflinching account of the epic, tragic deployment of 1st Platoon. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with Black Heart soldiers and first-hand reporting from the Triangle of Death, Black Hearts is a timeless story about men in combat and the fragility of character in the savage crucible of warfare. But it is also a timely warning of new dangers emerging in the way American soldiers are led on the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

In the wake of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Art Spiegelman’s Maus comes cartoonist Carol Tyler’s multigenerational graphic memoir, You’ll Never Know. The author chronicles her fraught relationship with her father, Charles, a WWII veteran, and how the war affected their lives through both childhood and adulthood. You’ll Never Know is also a tribute to servicemen and women, dramatizing the trauma of the war on the Greatest Generation and those who followed. Tyler’s ink and watercolor narrative is in turns sprawling and gimlet-eyed: compassionate and enraged. Her father’s memories are woven into her own, which span her Catholic, Midwestern childhood; her troubled marriage; her daughter’s struggles; and her efforts to care for her aging parents. Even though Tyler’s work has an accessible, homemade feel (the organizing metaphor of the book is a photo album with “snapshots” of Tyler family life), You’ll Never Know is a sophisticated graphic work about war, love, and loss.

Living in the shadowy interior of the brain's limbic system and invisible to the untrained eye, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can not only torture its victims for a lifetime, but reaches beyond victims to negatively influence family members and loved ones. Soldier's Heart, titled after one of the early names for PTSD, delves into the lives of otherwise normal American veterans who, seemingly for no reason, display lasting patterns of bad choices and erratic, self-destructive behavior. Analysis of the life portraits of combat veterans brings the myriad symptoms of PTSD to light, equipping the lay reader to recognize the disorder and gain a thorough understanding that can be the foundation for steps to facilitate healing. Four men and one woman who served in Vietnam describe how PTSD still tears at their lives 30 years later. The symptoms of PTSD are conveyed in non-technical language by the veterans featured in this absorbing work, presented by authors Schroder and Dawe, both Vietnam veterans and, respectively, now a writer-businessman and a mental health counselor. To fully explore the lifelong effects of war trauma in the 20th century, the focus must be on Vietnam veterans, explain Schroder and Dawe. Profound statements on the human condition, the narratives of the five featured veterans, from across branches of the military, offer emotional and intellectual comfort to millions of Americans whose relatives and friends have served the country in time of war. This book, which also includes a glossary of military terms, will be of interest to veterans and their families, as well as to counselors, therapists, psychologists, veteran care workers and students of studies in trauma, psychopthology, and treatment. These are more than war stories, because for these veterans the lingering war is internal—and it may never end.

"Brilliant . . . a must read for veterans and those who seek to understand them."—Huffington Post The Untold War draws on revealing interviews with servicemen and -women to offer keen psychological and philosophical insights into the experience of being a soldier. Bringing to light the ethical quandaries that soldiers face—torture, the thin line between fighters and civilians, and the anguish of killing even in a just war—Nancy Sherman opens our eyes to the fact that wars are fought internally as well as externally, enabling us to understand the emotional tolls that are so often overlooked.

Hearts of Soldiers is a book of poems that portray the hearts of many human beings that struggle every day with their emotional and mental thoughts. Their struggles that thrives from pain they have consumed from many hurtful events in their lives. Soldiers are people who are in the front line of battles which positions them to witness, experience and feel painful events in this world. This book shows us that everyone is a soldier fighting a battle within ourselves and what we go through gives us a whole new perspective of life and our place in this world. This book is for the people who struggle with their pain, love, insecurities and the search for their purpose but wake up hoping for a brighter day with the strength to carry on the fight. There is a poem for everyone in this book and it is open to interpretation. Find the poem that opens you and inspires your heart.