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A carregar... God is Not Here: A Soldier's Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War (edição 2015)por Lieutenant Colonel Bill Russell Edmonds (Autor), Bill Nash M. D. (Introdução), Thomas Ricks (Prefácio), George Lober (Contribuidor)
Informação Sobre a ObraGod is Not Here: A Soldier's Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War por Lieutenant Colonel Bill Russell Edmonds
   Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  ozzer | Jul 22, 2015 | 
 “God Is Not Here” shows how not to send a soldier to war; the experience is searing and often brutal, and only a well-led, well-trained, cohesive unit can help servicemen and servicewomen do their duty and survive both mentally and physically. Firsthand accounts like this one, however flawed, form an essential part of the documentation for historians and others to build upon. And in contrast to the Vietnam era, Americans have embraced rather than shunned their veterans, though as Edmonds’s account so tellingly demonstrates, much more remains to be done.
A powerful and intimate look into torture and its effect on both the tortured and the torturer. In May of 2005, the U.S. government finally acknowledged that the invasion of Iraq had spawned an insurgency. With that admission, training the Iraqi Forces suddenly became a strategic priority. Lt. Col. Bill Edmonds, then a Special Forces captain, was in the first group of "official" military advisors. He arrived in Mosul in the wake of Abu Ghraib, at the height of the insurgency, and in the midst of America's rapidly failing war strategy. Edmonds' job was to advise an Iraqi intelligence officer--to assist and temper his interrogations--but not give orders. But he wanted to be more than a wallflower, so he immersed himself in the experience, even learning Arabic. In a makeshift basement prison, over countless nights and predawn hours, Edmonds came to empathize with Iraqi rules: do what's necessary, do what works. After all, Americans and Iraqis were dying. He wanted to make a difference--yet the longer he submerged himself in the worst of humanity, the more conflicted and disillusioned he became, slowly losing faith in everything and everyone. In the end, he lost himself. He returned home with no visible wounds, but on the inside he was different. He tried to forget--to soldier on--but memories from war never just fade away. In this book, the weight of history is everywhere, but the focus is on a young man struggling to learn what is right when fighting wrong. Edmonds provides a disturbing and thought-provoking account of the morally ambiguous choices faced when living with and fighting within a foreign religion and culture, as well as the resulting psychological and spiritual impacts on a soldier.--Adapted from book jacket. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — A carregar...GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)956.70443History and Geography Asia Middle East IraqClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.5)
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The narrative follows two timelines: Iraq in 2005 and Germany in 2011. It is primarily an internal dialogue with few factual details. His muddled thinking is readily apparent in the narrative. This had three themes: problems with his girlfriend, Amy; torture of captive insurgents to obtain confessions; and the realization that the behavior of American troops toward Iraqis was making the insurgency worse. Edmonds concludes that the moral injury he suffered was due to a dissonance between his core moral values and the torture he witnessed there. This is difficult to assess because he only describes two incidents of torture, although it is likely that torture was highly prevalent because obtaining a confession was the key to the Iraqi legal system. Without it, captives would be released. Edmonds questions what constitutes torture and feels a dilemma between his desire to prevent insurgents from killing people and the brutal practices that were most effective at obtaining confessions. Curiously, Edmonds seems to presume all captives are guilty and the confession is just a necessary formality for sending them to prison. Also he totally ignores the abundant evidence indicating that intelligence obtained by torture is often unreliable. Indeed, it was not clear that Edmonds had much interest in obtaining intelligence at all, but just in removing these captives from the battlefield.
It seems clear that Edmonds did experience a collapse of his belief system and moral framework while deployed in Iraq and that this moral injury was minimized by the Army. However, the source may not have been torture, but the dissonance between his self-image as a good soldier and his belief that the American conduct of the counterinsurgency was misguided and in fact making it worse. Once he began to see the American involvement in Iraq in this light Edmonds became morally lost. It seems that there were only two possible solutions for him to resolve this dilemma: either openly protest up the chain of command or leave the Army. Sadly, he did neither. It is worth noting that this type of moral dilemma was highly prevalent during the Vietnam war but then soldiers could be more honest about it because most participated in that war against their wills as opposed to Iraq where all were volunteers. (