From America’s greatest chronicler of life lived at its extremes comes a rare work of fiction, an intimate, brutal account of a young American journalist trying to survive his latest assignment.

Though only 10 percent of American forces see combat, the U.S. military now has the highest rate of post-traumatic stress disorder in its history. Sebastian Junger investigates.

SEVERAL years ago I spent time with a platoon of Army infantry at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan, and after the deployment I was surprised that only one of the soldiers chose to leave the military at the end of his contract; many others re-upped and eventually went on to fight for another year in the same area. The soldier who got out, Brendan O’Byrne, remained a good friend of mine as he struggled to fit in to civilian life back home.

In light of the death of his great friend and frequent collaborator Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger reflects on Tim’s legacy and his theories about Middle Eastern turmoil, as well as the role the United States—and all Western democracies—must take to ensure an end to radicalism.

In light of the death of his great friend and frequent collaborator Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger reflects on Tim’s legacy and his theories about Middle Eastern turmoil, as well as the role the United States—and all Western democracies—must take to ensure an end to radicalism.

With the Pentagon requesting $20 billion more for Afghanistan, and American casualties mounting there, the author rejoins the men of Battle Company at their Korengal Valley outpost. The war has changed them; have they changed the war?

Once again, the Serb army is bombarding villages and massacring entire families, this time to crush a fledgling independence movement in the province of Kosovo, on the former Yugoslavia’s border with Albania. Dodging sniper bullets in a savage landscape of bunkers, machine-gun nests, and newly dug graves, the author explores the conflict’s bloody origins in the 14th-century Battle of Blackbird Field, the unspeakable cruelty now taking place, and the terrifying shadow of a war that could engulf Albania, Greece, and Turkey.

Under NATO control, Kosovo has become a vast crime scene, containing evidence of thousands of killings. With mass graves around almost every corner, teams from the F.B.I., the R.C.M.P., and Scotland Yard are trying to find the strongest cases to bring before the international war-crimes tribunal.

A strategic passage wanted by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley is among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces. One platoon is considered the tip of the American spear. Its men spend their days in a surreal combination of backbreaking labor—building outposts on rocky ridges—and deadly firefights, while they try to avoid the mistakes the Russians made. Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington join the platoon’s painfully slow advance, as its soldiers laugh, swear, and run for cover, never knowing which of them won’t make it home.

Afghanistan’s master guerrilla commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated by suspected al-Qaeda suicide bombers just two days before September 11. But his Northern Alliance coalition became the U.S.’s most important weapon against the Taliban in a war that combined 19th-century slaughter and 21st-century technology. As alliance soldiers marched on Kabul—with a massed-infantry assault amid the deadly shadows of B-52 bombers—the author saw Massoud’s legacy revealed, in the Afghans’ hatred of foreigners fighting for the Taliban, in their readiness to die for freedom, and even, poignantly, in one man’s act of mercy.

Terrorized and recruited by the army, by rebel groups, and by private militias, a generation of Liberian kids know little but inhuman cruelty and slaughter. Will the arrival of peacekeeping forces and the departure of President Charles Taylor end the violence that has raged since 1989, when Taylor began his war on the corrupt, U.S.-backed Doe regime? In a country where diamond traffickers, arms dealers, and al-Qaeda all have profited from the mayhem, the author witnesses a deadly attack on thousands of civilians seeking refuge in a compound next to the American Embassy.

The photographs on these pages, of torture and executions by the rebels of Sierra Leone, are among the best pieces of evidence documenting the Revolutionary United Front's savage war against civilians. Yet until now, barely a handful of people knew these shocking images existed. With a special court for war crimes being set up to try captured rebel leader Foday Sankoh and other top R.U.F. commanders, the author tells how the photos came to be published here, for the first time, thanks to a courageous victim who barely escaped death to bring back a damning record of atrocities.