Un-American

A powerful manifesto and memoir about America’s unchallenged war machine, from a West Point graduate and veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Erik Edstrom was a member of a striving middle class family in Massachusetts when he enrolled in West Point. Four years later, he was deployed as a Lieutenant to Afghanistan, where he saw atrocities and experienced violence that led him to question America''s mission and the need for war in general. Blending his own doubt, his sense of moral complicity in an unjust war, and a searing examination of America and Americans at war, Edstrom lays out the stakes and the true cost of war: the death of young people on both sides of the battlefield and the wasted resources that could have been applied instead toward solving world problems. For readers of The Forever War and It Happened on the Way to War, Un-American is a manifesto that bridges the gap between Edstrom''s own terrifying experience as a soldier and the behemoth of America’s shortsighted, self-destructive warmongering.