Khorramshahr, Iran, May 1982–It was the bloodiest battle of one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century, and Najah, a twenty-nine-year-old wounded Iraqi conscript, was face to face with a thirteen-year-old Iranian child soldier who was ordered to kill him. Instead, the boy committed an astonishing act of mercy. It was an act that decades later would save his own life. This is a … This is a remarkable story. It is gut-wrenching, essential, and astonishing. It’s a war story. A love story. A page-turner of vast moral dimensions. An eloquent and haunting act of witness to horrors beyond grimmest fiction, and a thing of towering beauty. More importantly, it is a story that must be told, and a richly textured view into an overlooked conflict and misunderstood region. This is the great untold story of the children and young men whose lives were sacrificed at the whim of vicious dictators and pointless, barbaric wars.
Little has been written of the Iran-Iraq war, which was among the most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century, one fought with chemical weapons, ballistic missiles, and cadres of child soldiers.
The numbers involved are staggering:
–All told, it claimed 700,000 lives–200,000 Iraqis, and 500,000 Iranians.
–Young men of military service age–eighteen and above in Iraq, fifteen and above in Iran–died in the greatest numbers.
–80,000 Iranian child soldiers were killed, mostly between the ages of sixteen and seventeen.
–The two countries spent a combined 1.1 trillion dollars fighting the war.
Rarely does this kind of reportage succeed so power- fully as literature. More rarely still does such searingly brilliant literature–fit to stand beside Remarque, Hemingway, and O’Brien–emerge from behind “enemy” lines.
But Zahed, a child, and Najah, a young restaurateur, are rare men–not just survivors, but masterful, wondrously gifted storytellers. Written with award-winning journalist Meredith May, this is literature of a very high order, set down with passion, urgency, and consummate skill. This story is an affirmation that, in the end, it is our humanity that transcends politics and borders and saves us all.
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An incredibly powerful story.
It’s all too easy to overlook the fact that both sides of a war are made up of individuals, not a coherent, cohesive mass of soldiers with the same motivation for participating.
Many are conscripted with no religious ideology forming their decision making and attitudes. Such it was with these two young men on opposing sides of the Iran-Iraq war.
An extraordinary, at times quite harrowing tale, but eventually quite uplifting, of their involvement in the war and the path their lives took as a result.
I was riveted from first page to last. An incredibly thought provoking story of two amazing men. It’s one that will linger in one’s thoughts long after the book is closed.
I couldn’t put this book down. Brilliantly written, beautiful language.. Disturbing revelations about the cruelty of which humans are capable.
The book exposed much I didn’t know about this conflict and I feared for and sympathized with the dilemma of the main characters. It was informative and sad in many ways.
An exceptional book. A true story.
I initially picked this up because I was not very knowledgable about the Iran-Iraq war. It was interesting to read from both the Iranian and Iraqi points of view. The two men in this novel are wonderfully imperfect characters, making this an engaging page turner. There are moments of brutality, but also hope and humor.
At time i cried for the central characters – but loved the ending
Very interesting story about the Iran Iraq war. I knew very little about this time and place in history and enjoyed reading about 2 men’s lives and how their paths crossed.
This book was amazing. The story of survival and the will to live is just incredible. There were times when I had to remind myself that I was reading a true story. I highly recommend this book to everyone. The ending is epic. Thank you for opening my eyes to a world I knew little about.
Pure crap.
This is an absolutely incredible story!
This history reads like a novel. So much so that there were times
I forgot I was reading history. Yes, there is some foul language. This is the real story of real men and real teen boys thrown into really foul circumstances of war and war prisons warranting a few appropriately foul phrases. This should be mandatory high school history reading — maybe a greater degree of humanity would be demonstrated. I feel doubly blessed to be living in the USA without war on our land, and thankful that Canada gave asylum to both of the primary characters. I wonder if the US would have welcomed them???
Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Interesting twist of fate, almost ‘too good to be true’.
Iraq Iran war through the eyes of the soldiers who fought, were imprisoned, helpless at the hands of the powerful. Gut wrenching,yet inspiring.
A BOOK THAT MAKES YOU WONDER THE SHEER USELESSNESS OF WAR,AND HOW MANKIND CAN IN THE NAME OF RELIGION CONTINUES TO BREED HATRED FOR THEIR FELLOWMEN.
This book caught me off guard. I truly did not expect to be as engaging as it was. But from the first page, I was locked in.
It confirmed what I thought about soldiers in the middle east. They are human beings, and may or may not be in a situation they have chosen.
Heart wrenching. Romantic. True story about love and survival during terrible times…
If ever there needed to be proof that war is hell for people on either side and that a single act of mercy and grace can have unimaginable consequences, this story delivers. I found myself following the story of these two men with sorrow, but also great respect for their courage and resilience to survive the horrors of their respective imprisonment. A book that will remain with you for a long time.
A truue story of war, and eventual friendship of two men who met on the battlefield, the tie between them, and the lifelong friendship that their experiences formed. You learn the history of the Iran-Iraq War, which most of us don’t remember even happened. And you learn again, that war solves nothing, and only perpetuates suffering on all sides. Woy can’t the governments of the world begin to see this after eons of example??
A great read. An amazing of account of a man who wanted to live.
It was a great book about the muslim religious war between Iran and Iraq, but that there are still people that want to just be humane, and human to each other.
I read this book to try to gain some insight into the Iran/Iraq war and the basis for their culture clash at the time. It is easy to see the source of the culture clash. It is hard to understand how humans can behave they way they do with prisoners.
This is an age-old problem. These military leaders, or whoever is in charge, take it to a new level. Not quite Nazi concentration camps, but borderline. It is troublesome that prisoners were held for a decade or more after the war ended for no particular reason. It was clear that they minimized their food budget for the prisoners, and that the prisons provided employment. But there were no other benefits to hanging on to these men.
The camp leadership was, as I expected, a mixed bag. But for the most part populated by men who were working to gain more than a job and sense of power in these positions. Their cruelty was the evidence of yheir failure and frustration.
But after the hardships of going untrained into battle, being captured and held for years by their enemies, both men in the story held onto their sense of self and what was important to them. They met on the battlefield where one could have killed the other, but instead chose to save his life as he was bleeding to death only to come across each other on another continent and still recognize each other after dozens of years past with hardships suffered by both.
The story is one you read to see how it ends. But through it all, there is grace walking by their sides. Preserving them & their sense of worth so that they make it to this moment when they can understand the value of humanity over nationalism.