Collateral Damage

Laila Al-Arian and Chris Hedges
June 2008     ISBN: 1568583737

In this devastating exposé of a military occupation gone awry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges and journalist Laila Al-Arian reveal the terrifying reality of daily civilian life in Iraq at the hands of U.S. troops. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with combat veterans, Collateral Damage represents the largest number of named eyewitnesses from within the U.S. military to have testified on the record. These veterans, many of whom have come to oppose the war, explain the tactics and operations that have turned many Iraqis against the U.S. military.

Through the voices of the veterans in these pages we learn how the mechanics of war—home raids, convoys, patrols, detentions, military checkpoints—lead to the daily abuse and frequent killing of innocents. They describe convoys of dozens of vehicles roaring down Iraqi roads, jumping medians, smashing into civilian cars and hitting Iraqi civilians without stopping to survey the damage. They detail raids that leave homes ransacked and families humiliated, shaking with fear, or shot dead in the mayhem. And they describe a battlefield in which troops, untrained to distinguish between combatant and civilian, are authorized to shoot whenever they feel threatened. "Better to be tried by twelve men than carried by six," many said. Better, in short, to kill than be killed.

The soldiers and Marines interviewed in Collateral Damage describe the venality of a war fought largely out of view of journalists and television cameras. A stark and unflinching narrative, Collateral Damage exposes the true consequences of the war that the American government has unleashed in Iraq.

"In this book, as always, Hedges brings out the disturbing nature of war as pornography of violence, war as violence understood - even by those engaged in it - through a lens of fantasy and wishful thinking. When veterans come home from what they've finally understood to be hellish murder and rape without redemption, the bullshit they hear on television and from their fellow citizens about heroism can make them hide inside themselves, lose their sanity, or find the unbelievable courage to speak out. When they speak to real journalists, we get a book as good as this one."
—David Swanson, AfterDowningStreet.org

[This is a] "disturbing but well-written book about the damages of war that journalists don't usually cover."
—Dennis Lythgoe, Deseret News

Laila Al-Arian is a freelance journalist living in New York City. A graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, she has interned for USA Today and The Nation magazine, and has written for United Press International, The Huffington Post, The Dupont Current and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, is the former Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times, and a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America, I Don't Believe in Atheists, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.