4.0
Places and Names
ByPublisher Description
One of NPR's Best Books of 2019
“Lyrical . . . A thoughtful perspective on America’s role overseas.” —Washington Post
From a decorated Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist, an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
“War hath determined us.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost
Toward the beginning of Places and Names, Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he takes a risk by revealing to him that in fact he was a Marine special operation officer. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary quickly joins him in the game of filling in the map with the names and dates of places where they saw fighting during the war. They had shadowed each other for some time, it turned out, a realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy.
The rest of Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir is in a way an answer to the question of why he came to that refugee camp, and what he hoped to find there. By moving back and forth between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and its environs and his deeper past in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of remarkable atmospheric pressurization. Ackerman shares vivid and powerful stories of his own experiences in combat, culminating in the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah, the most intense urban combat for the Marines since Hue in Vietnam, where Ackerman's actions leading a rifle platoon saw him awarded the Silver Star. He weaves these stories into the latticework of a masterful larger reckoning with contemporary geopolitics through his vantage as a journalist in Istanbul and with the human extremes of both bravery and horror.
At once an intensely personal story about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the larger meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region, and the world, Places and Names bids fair to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.
“Lyrical . . . A thoughtful perspective on America’s role overseas.” —Washington Post
From a decorated Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist, an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
“War hath determined us.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost
Toward the beginning of Places and Names, Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he takes a risk by revealing to him that in fact he was a Marine special operation officer. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary quickly joins him in the game of filling in the map with the names and dates of places where they saw fighting during the war. They had shadowed each other for some time, it turned out, a realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy.
The rest of Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir is in a way an answer to the question of why he came to that refugee camp, and what he hoped to find there. By moving back and forth between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and its environs and his deeper past in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of remarkable atmospheric pressurization. Ackerman shares vivid and powerful stories of his own experiences in combat, culminating in the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah, the most intense urban combat for the Marines since Hue in Vietnam, where Ackerman's actions leading a rifle platoon saw him awarded the Silver Star. He weaves these stories into the latticework of a masterful larger reckoning with contemporary geopolitics through his vantage as a journalist in Istanbul and with the human extremes of both bravery and horror.
At once an intensely personal story about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the larger meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region, and the world, Places and Names bids fair to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesPlaces and Names Reviews
4.0
“Certainly there can be no better person to write a book about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan than Elliot Ackerman. This author has been decorated with many of our country's highest honors after serving five tours of duty in places most of us have read about but never really knew. Jan and I discovered in this book a world that held no answers but just a desire to know if the wars fought really in the end have meaning for those lost, and for those who returned all of whom were scarred in some way.
Honestly, it is hard for me to come to grips with this story for it contains no answers only questions as to our involvement in the conflicts we have found ourselves in for many years. Countless lives have been lost, including those of friends of the author and yet we have no resolution, no ending, no ability to see the fruits of our lost soldiers and the work of those who have come back home ladled with illness, stress, and PTSD. How can we reconcile the loss? Is it through understanding of our enemies humanity? Even if we get to know them, as Mr Ackerman was able to do, can the rest of the world understand that humanity can only succeed when the strife between nations ceases. We can declare a win and yet the minute we leave, the radical Islamic groups move right back in. Afghanistan, and to the same extent Iraq, have a tribal culture that has been in place for centuries. How can the US, or in fact any nation, hope to break that? The author points to the futility of the struggle. War does not solve anything really but it does create sorrow, pain, and the unending losses that plagued a nation. It has certainly plagued our nation. They say that there are always two sides to every story, and in this book we get to see the other side, the side that is hidden as the horrific scenes of warfare play across our TV screens and are broadcast in our news outlets.
I live in a military area. I know people who have fought in both Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and I have seen the lives they now live. Many of them have medical problems, suffer from combat stress, and yet when or if their country asked them to, they probably would go once again into the war zone. I had to wonder at the conclusion of the eye opening book, whether the author would ever do what he did once again. I tend to think the answer would be no. We can't and shouldn't be the world's police.
Thanks go out to Elliot Ackerman, Penguin Press, and Edelweiss for an advanced copy of this thought provoking book. Also Mr Ackerman, thank you for your service to our nation.
To see both our reviews and an author dialogue, you can go here: http://yayareadslotsofbooks.wordpress.com/”
About Elliot Ackerman
Elliot Ackerman is the author of Sheepdogs, The Fifth Act, Places and Names, 2034, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and non-fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.
Other books by Elliot Ackerman
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