War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

This book was assigned for my Propaganda and War class and am glad because I would have been missing out on a powerful and important read.


Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who spent over a decade reporting from the battlefield. In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning Hedges writes with gut wrenching honesty about the cost of war on those who fight and those who get caught up in the crossfire. He shares insights from what he witnessed, what those he spoke to in all the war torn areas he was in shared with him, and from the literature he spent a long time finding refuge in.

War is like a drug, it becomes addicting and draws both reporter and service personal back time after time. Many, including Hedges find it difficult to come back to the world of everyday living once they have lived the adrenaline fueled life of war.  Sanity, familial and other relationships, and often the physical health of the returnee are the high price paid.

Not a pleasant read but very well done, this book sheds light on the myth of war, the problems caused by nationalism taken to the extremes and the cost beyond money that war inflicts on society.

(Finished February 22, 2014)