The Fighters

"C.J. Chivers is no ordinary war correspondent. Unlike most journalists covering combat, he’s also a former Marine Corps infantry officer, and as you read The Fighters, you get the sense these fighters are opening up to him in a way they would only do with one of their own. The book asks big, hard policy questions about Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that Chivers has reported on extensively for The New York Times. But he organizes his narrative around human moments, the stories of six combatants. Through them, Chivers poses one of the biggest, hardest questions of all: How many lives have these wars wrecked?"