Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Death and Remembrance in American Wars
2 American Wars and the Culture of Violence
3 Strategic Bombing in the Second World War
4 The Korean War: The Hegemony of Forgetting
5 The Vietnam War: The High Cost of Credibility
6 The Reagan Doctrine: Savage War by Proxy
7 Iraq: The Twenty Years' War
8 Afghanistan: Hot Pursuit on Terrorism's Frontier
9 Three Atrocities and the Rules of Engagement
10 Counting: A Single Death is a Tragedy, a Million Deaths are a Statistic
11 The Epistemology of War
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

About the Author

John Tirman is Principal Research Scientist and Executive Director of the Center for International Studies, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include Terror, Insurgency, and the State: Ending Protracted Conflicts and 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World.

Reviews

"This sad and gripping record of crimes we dare not face, and the probing analysis of the roots of indifference and denial, tell us all too much about ourselves. It should be read, and pondered." -Noam Chomsky
"John Tirman has not only written a profoundly important, revelatory work about something that most people in this country ignore; he has looked deep into our history and the American mind to see why we ignore it. I wish I could give this highly readable book to everyone, from general to private to the civilian bureaucrats who send them off to kill, who shares the illusion that war mainly involves soldiers." -Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars
"The Deaths of Others is an incredibly important venture. I know of no other book that so comprehensively catalogues the victims of U.S. wars . . . Tirman has given us the definitive study of an extremely important but neglected subject. It a must-read for anyone concerned with the lethal impact of U.S. policy on people in all corners of the world." --The Progressive
"Stunning . . . Tirman lays out his strenuously argued case with considerable cogency . . . Tirman renders us great service by providing a fuller picture of the consequences of war and challenging us not to reject data simply because it is not congruent with our favored worldview . . . If Americans today marshal the resolve to enact workable normas ensuring that our use of drones will always discriminate between civilians and legimate enemy targets, then we
will at last be facing up to the crucial moral questions raised in this book." --America
"In this extraordinary work, John Tirman engages and investigates an area that has generated relatively little attention or thought over several decades, if not centuries: the deaths of others ... [a] thought-provoking and powerful book."--David Ryan, International Affairs (01/05/2012)
"John Tirman has written a compelling and impassioned plea for attention to a neglected
and vital aspect of American history. He argues that Americans have ignored the human costs of their wars, and his book provides a grim tour of the devastation and suffering that the U.S. military has inflicted on civilians... [Tirman] has restarted an important discussion of the human costs of war. It is a conversation well worth continuing, and we can be grateful that Tirman has not provided all the answers."--Journal of American History