Parallels: The Soldiers' Knowledge and the Oral History of Contemporary Warfare (Communication and Social Order)

Parallels reclaims the experience of American and Soviet participants in the two longest and most devastating episodes of contemporary warfare, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and places them within the context of social and behavioral theory.

As texts, the narratives, here ordered and re-encoded, are as fragmentary as the war experiences they recount. Much of their, language is hermetic; sometimes it is brutal and unpalatable. Within the broader context of this book, however, they attain to a historical relevance, posing a challenge to conventional understandings of contemporary warfare.