Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and
Afghanistan in the service of the U.S. War on Terror. Marian Eide
and Michael Gibler have collected and compiled personal combat
accounts from some of these war veterans. In modern warfare no
deployment meets the expectations laid down by stories of
Appomattox, Ypres, Iwo Jima, or Tet. Stuck behind a desk or the
wheel of a truck, many of today's veterans feel they haven't even
been to war though they may have listened to mortars in the night
or dodged improvised explosive devices during the day. When a drone
is needed to verify a target's death or bullets are sprayed like
grass seed, military offensives can lack the immediacy that comes
with direct contact.After Combat bridges the gap between
sensationalized media and reality by telling war's unvarnished
stories. Participating soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force
personnel (retired, on leave, or at the beginning of military
careers) describe combat in the ways they believe it should be
understood. In this collection of interviews, veterans speak
anonymously with pride about their own strengths and
accomplishments, with gratitude for friendships and adventures, and
also with shame, regret, and grief, while braving controversy,
misunderstanding, and sanction. In the accounts of these veterans,
Eide and Gibler seek to present what Vietnam veteran and writer Tim
O'Brien calls a "true war story"—one without obvious purpose or
moral imputation and independent of civilian logic, propaganda
goals, and even peacetime convention.