Where War Lives
Veteran war correspondent Watson takes the reader on a graphic tour of modern battlefields from Eritrea to Afghanistan, with a particularly haunting stop in war-torn Somalia. It was in Somalia that Watson photographed the corpse of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu—a photo that set off a firestorm of outrage in the U.S. and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Watson claims that he was consumed by anger, fear, and shame after taking the picture and later sought exoneration from the soldier's family. A self-described war junkie who calls Kashmir a fiery seductress, Watson is undeterred even when he's diagnosed with chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The lessons that he learns—[w]ar does not conquer evil, truth is a moving target and war lives in all of us, among them—are neither original nor particularly helpful. Watson is at his best describing the sights and sounds of war; his book suffers and he loses credibility when he poses as a journalist-savant whose only loyalty is to the truth.(Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.