The Fighters

“A classic of war reporting...The author’s stories give heart-rending meaning to the lives and deaths of these men and women, even if policymakers generally have not.” —The New York Times

Pulitzer Prize winner C.J. Chivers’s unvarnished account of modern combat, told through the eyes of the fighters who have waged America’s longest wars.

More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001. C.J. Chivers reported from both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant.

Chivers captures their courage, commitment, sense of purpose, and ultimately their suffering, frustration, and moral confusion as new enemies arise and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which American forces were often not prepared.

The Fighters is a tour de force, a portrait of modern warfare that parts from slogans to do for American troops what Stephen Ambrose did for the G.I.s of World War II and Michael Herr for the grunts in Vietnam. Told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran, The Fighters presents the long arc of two wars.

• The Gun
• The Gun
• Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
• Run to the Sound of the Guns: The True Story of an American Ranger at War in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Echo in Ramadi: The Firsthand Story of US Marines in Iraq's Deadliest City
• Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead
• Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning
• On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle
• Eat the Apple
• The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy)