Soldiers Never Sleep

"Soldiers Never Sleep" is the story of Andy Walker, the battles he fights and the women he loves. Historical fiction, the book is about the Indian Wars, the Buffalo Soldiers, and World War Two in the South Pacific. Great warriors fill the pages, men like Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Black Jack Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur. Along the way, Andy meets Honey, the wild Kentucky girl; Nancy, the mother of his children; and Helen, the Red Cross volunteer in the Fiji Islands. Two themes hold the story together: discrimination in the military and atrocities on the battlefield. The title is taken from an Indian curse placed on the Walker family by the old Sioux medicine man, Sitting Bull.

The author had enlisted in 1901 in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and was a reservist when the First World War broke out. He rejoined his old, 2nd Battalion and landed in France with them on 11 August 1914. He went right through the war with the battalion, never missing a battle, winning the D.C.M. and M.M. Here is a typical soldier of the pre-1914 regular army, and this book is a delight, written in his own unpolished manner. Fighting, scrounging, gambling, drinking, dodging fatigues, stolidly enduring bombardment and the hardships of trench warfare, always getting his job done. This is one of the finest of all published memoirs of the Great War, truly a classic of its kind. A tribute to the army that died on the Western Front.

"Rand National Defense Research Institute."

'...A remarkable and fascinating account...' --Phil Carradice, BBC From the author of the celebrated Great War memoir Old Soldiers Never Die, Old Soldier Sahib is Frank Richards' account of his experiences as a Royal Welch Fusilier in India and Burma at the dawn of the 20th century.

How the military used sleep as a weapon—and how soldiers fought back On April 21, 1971, hundreds of Vietnam veterans fell asleep on the National Mall, wondering whether they would be arrested by daybreak. Veterans had fought the courts for the right to sleep in public while demonstrating against the war. When the Supreme Court denied their petition, they decided to break the law and turned sleep into a form of direct action. During and after the Second World War, military psychiatrists used sleep therapies to treat an epidemic of “combat fatigue.” Inducing deep and twilight sleep in clinical settings, they studied the effects of war violence on the mind and developed the techniques of brainwashing that would weaponize both memory and sleep. In the Vietnam era, radical veterans reclaimed the authority to interpret their own traumatic symptoms—nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia —and pioneered new methods of protest. In Fighting Sleep, Franny Nudelman recounts the struggle over sleep in the postwar world, revealing that the subject was instrumental to the development of military science, professional psychiatry, and antiwar activism.

"Old Soldiers Never Die" is a captivating memoir offering a remarkable firsthand account of trench life in World War I. Follow Private Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers as he survives the grueling battles from Mons to Passchendaele, providing an engaging perspective on the war's human experience. A must-read for war memoir enthusiasts.