Book
Declarations of War
This collection follows soldiers and civilians through conflicts separated by more than two thousand years. The stories move from the ancient Mediterranean to the American Civil War, the world wars, Vietnam and later border conflicts, concentrating on moments when training, fear and obedience narrow a character’s choices. Airmen, officers and ordinary troops repeatedly discover that military systems value them differently from the way they understand themselves.
The settings change, but Deighton returns to the same pressures: uncertainty, institutional language, chance and the moral distance between those who order violence and those who carry it out. The short form allows each episode to isolate a different contradiction in the experience of war.
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