Where War Lives

Veteran war correspondent Watson takes the reader on a graphic tour of modern battlefields from Eritrea to Afghanistan, with a particularly haunting stop in war-torn Somalia. It was in Somalia that Watson photographed the corpse of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu—a photo that set off a “firestorm of outrage” in the U.S. and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Watson claims that he was “consumed by anger, fear, and shame” after taking the picture and later sought exoneration from the soldier's family. A self-described “war junkie” who calls Kashmir “a fiery seductress,” Watson is undeterred even when he's diagnosed with “chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.” The lessons that he learns—“[w]ar does not conquer evil,” “truth is a moving target” and war “lives in all of us,” among them—are neither original nor particularly helpful. Watson is at his best describing the sights and sounds of war; his book suffers and he loses credibility when he poses as a journalist-savant whose only loyalty is to the truth. (Sept.)