Close Up On War

The incredible story of Catherine Leroy, one of the few woman photographers during the Vietnam War, told by an award-winning journalist and children’s author From award-winning journalist and children’s book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris before, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war. Despite being told that women didn't belong in a “man’s world,” she was cool under fire, gravitated toward the thickest battles, went along on the soldiers’ slogs through the heat and mud of the jungle, crawled through rice paddies, and became the only official photojournalist to parachute into combat with American soldiers. Leroy took striking photos that gave America no choice but to look at the realities of war—showing what it did to people on both sides—from wounded soldiers to civilian casualties. Later, Leroy was gravely wounded from shrapnel, but that didn’t keep her down more than a month. When captured by the North Vietnamese in 1968, she talked herself free after photographing her captors, scoring a cover story in Life magazine. A recipient of the George Polk Award, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, Leroy was one of the most well-known photographers in the world during her time, and her legacy of bravery and compassion endures today. Farrell interviewed people who knew Leroy, as well as military personnel and other journalists who covered the war. In addition to a foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Peter Arnot, the book includes a preface, author’s note, endnotes, bibliography, timeline, and index.

The past two decades have seen revolutionary shifts in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The data flows that condition much of our lives now regularly include Global Positioning System (GPS) readings and satellite images of a quality once reserved for a few militaries and intelligence agencies, and powerful geographic information system (GIS) software is now commonplace. These new technologies have raised fundamental questions about the intersection between physical space and its representation, virtual space and its realization. In Close Up at a Distance, Laura Kurgan offers a theoretical account of these new digital technologies of location and a series of practical experiments in making maps and images with spatial data. Neither simply useful tools nor objects of wonder or anxiety, the technologies of GPS, GIS, and satellite imagery become, in this book, the subject and the medium of a critical exploration. Close Up at a Distance records situations of intense conflict and struggle, on the one hand, and fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space, on the other. Kurgan maps and theorizes mass graves, incarceration patterns, disappearing forests, and currency flows in a series of cases that range from Kuwait (1991) to Kosovo (1999), New York (2001) to Indonesia (2010). Using digital spatial hardware and software designed for military and governmental use in reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security, Kurgan engages and confronts the politics and complexities of these technologies and their uses. At the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, she uncovers, in her essays and projects, the opacities inherent in the recording of information and data and reimagines the spaces they have opened up.

Describes a hypothetical battle between Soviet and NATO forces in West Germany and discusses the weapons and strategies used

Between the French Indochina war of the fifties and the fall of Phnom Penn and Saigon in 1975, 134 photographers from different nations were killed. Horst Faas, two-times Pullitzer Prize winner and Chief Photographer for The Associated Press in Saigon at the height of the war, and Tim Page, another veteran who had been badly wounded, have gathered many thousands of photos from the Western agencies and from archives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. These have now been assembled to form both a monument to the dead and a record of the most terrifying war photography ever taken. Never again will the media have the kind of access to the war zone that was offered to the photographers in Vietnam. In many cases the photographers tried to get as close as possible, then paid the price.

This encyclopedic account of the Second World War is an exhaustive resource for school reports and war buffs alike. Through daily entries that chart the rise, peak years, and ultimate close to the war, this volume provides readers with a comprehensive examination of World War II, the war that affected Europe for decades after and made the United States into a world power. Rich prose capsules and vivid historical photographs bring to life the famous battles, key figures, and important treaties that made up the greatest worldwide conflict in modern history.

World War I was one of the greatest tragedies in history. While other wars resulted in greater casualties or lasted for longer periods of time, the all-encompassing and unprecedented destructive nature of the Great War makes it a conflict in the chronicles of war that still resonates to this day. This text explains to readers the buildup to, the major events of, and the legacy of “the war to end all wars” through a thrilling narrative, a wealth of primary-source quotations, and intense black-and-white photographs.

The American Civil War was fought for idealistic American goals such as freedom, states’ rights, and unity. Such ideals notwithstanding, the four-year war (1861–1865) all too often descended into outright butchery, leading to more than 620,000 deaths. Accompanied by battlefield photographs and other primary sources, this chronicle covers all aspects of the war, including the technology and battle plans of both the Union and Confederate armies. As a counterpoint to the usual history of the victors, the final chapter gives a Southern perspective on the war’s causes and legacy.

This gripping book is about what it was really like to fight at the sharp end in World War II. In 1947, US General S. L. A Marshall controversially wrote that out of every one hundred combat soldiers only fifteen to twenty-five actually fired their weapons at the enemy, because of the innate human reluctance to take another's life. Others maintained the opposite view that soldiers enjoyed killing. David Lee demonstrates that the situation was far more complex than either of these positions, arguing that the crucial factor for a unit s success in battle was the type of training it received. To illustrate this Lee covers actions from each theatre of the war, in depth and with comprehensive coverage of weapons and tactics. First there is the story of what happened when a battalion of British soldiers trained in the traditional manner came up against the Waffen SS, whose training was formidable and bore close resemblance to the Commandos . The success of No. 4 Commando at Dieppe is covered to show how this was put into effect. For the desert war there is a detailed look at how a rifle battalion held the snipe position against overwhelming odds, and how that same battalion was virtually wiped out when it later went to Italy. For the Far East, Lee explains how hatred of the Japanese Army gave impetus to British soldiers fighting at Kohima and American soldiers at Iwo Jima. And finally there is the story of one US infantry regiment on D-Day.

A controversial psychological examination of how soldiers’ willingness to kill has been encouraged and exploited to the detriment of contemporary civilian society. Psychologist and US Army Ranger Dave Grossman writes that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to pull the trigger in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning, have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. The mental cost for members of the military, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The sociological cost for the rest of us is even worse: Contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army’s conditioning techniques and, Grossman argues, is responsible for the rising rate of murder and violence, especially among the young. Drawing from interviews, personal accounts, and academic studies, On Killing is an important look at the techniques the military uses to overcome the powerful reluctance to kill, of how killing affects the soldier, and of the societal implications of escalating violence.