Advance Praise for American Veterans on War

“The truth of any myth, says Claude Lévi Strauss, is the sum of all of its versions. The same might well be said of any history, especially that of war. There is never one war or one true history of it. Every war is countless, in the lives it touches and in the stories it spawns; and the truth of any war is finally ‘out’ and ‘safe’ only once all of its stories have been told and listened to and preserved. Stories are a matter of life and death for war veterans, a road to healing, a road to be traveled by us all. Elise Forbes Tripp has done us all a great service by taking in and passing on to us the resonant voices and stories of fifty-five men and women whose collective military service spans our nation’s major wars of the last seventy years. They cannot possibly offer the whole truth, but they bring us closer to it. Every shard is precious and indispensable.”

—Robert Emmet Meagher, Professor of Humanities,
Hampshire College, and author of Herakles Gone Mad:
Rethinking Heroism in an Age of Endless War

“American Veterans on War offers fresh and unforgettable accounts as told by US veterans from World War II to Afghanistan and Iraq. It's sensational. I'm also amazed by veterans like Don Ryan who fought in multiple wars. We hear in these voices what it is really like to serve in such different wars, and how veterans will forever carry the imprint of war in their hearts.”

—Andrew Carroll, editor of the New York Times bestsellers War Letters,
Behind the Lines, and the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming