The Secret Life of War by Peter Beaumont

There is no feeling to compare with the perfection of this moment. When the accumulation of early bravado, soaring adrenal exhilaration and pant-wetting terror melts into the cold calculation of experience. You move and make decisions like lightning in a world so slowed down you can almost count the shards of shrapnel flying through the air.

It doesn't last long. Not the moment nor the understanding it comes with. Repeat the experience often enough and individual minds come apart. Spread the experience across a nation and you get social collapse, spreading through dead tissue of morality like a contaminated wound.

For most men sent to fight or cover it, war is the chance to play ring-and-run with death. It's fun to hold a bucking machine gun, to fire a grenade launcher and blow stuff up.

At first. But war is really about children whose grey brains have been spilled on pavements, about gut-shot young men slowly rotting to death on the streets of Baghdad with part of their intestines poking out.

We all "know" war is ghastly. But perhaps most men secretly hanker for a taste. Read this book then try to swallow.

As a young reporter, Peter Beaumont was fascinated by war. In middle age he finds himself suffering night terrors, daylight horrors of the imagination and the accumulation of loathing that clings to him like Lady Macbeth's blood spot.

To make sense of his classic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms, he digs into his own brain like a forensic pathologist. He discovers scientific evidence that fear and horror can cause changes to the brain, truncating the memory and withering nerve endings in the hippocampus.

The pre-frontal cortex goes through structural changes. This and other rewiring of the brain affects learning, memory and the ability to control emotions. It is brain damage.

When two peoples have been at war as long as the Israelis and Palestinians, it is no surprise that both societies have PTSD. Their national stories further feed the madness that grows with the increasing horrors each visit on the other.

The irony is that as the Israelis insist on what they admit are disproportional responses to Palestinian terror attacks, they create yet more madness and more violence in the hearts of Palestinian children. This isn't a vicious circle, it's insane.

The Secret Life of War swirls from Baghdad to Beirut, to Bosnia and Bethlehem, in a maelstrom of mostly ghastly recollections as Beaumont examines the damage war has done to his own head. His compassion is probably his undoing, for in war that way madness most certainly lies.

There is a limit to how much horror a human can witness before "I now feel only&a dull ache".

This book is as fascinating as a pathological examination and about as much fun. Beaumont is fluid and elegant in his description of the disease of war and its symptoms but offers no cure. War is, in my view, largely about boys being boys with big boys' toys. So disarm all men, confine all males between 14 and 30 to sports camps and put women in charge. A crazy idea, but better than the alternative.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Once it was simple to write about war. States or ideologies clashed; battles were fought between national armies or movements. But war has changed. War has become 'privatised' by small armed groups, states have fragmented and the conventional arms of the United States have been defeated by warlordism. Drawing on the author's experiences as the "Observer's" chief foreign correspondent, "The Secret Life of War" focuses on the human cost of war: to the combatants, to civilians and to the author, as one who bears witness. Every encounter is arresting: a visit to the bombed and abandoned home of Mullah Omar; a deserted Al Qaeda camp where Beaumont discovers documents describing a plan to bomb London; and, young bomb-throwers in Rafah refugee camp. But what marks out "The Secret Life of War" from innumerable other accounts is the sum it makes of these parts: a lasting catalogue of fear and harm, an anatomy of the human impulse to confrontation; an atlas of armed conflict. Often travelling unembedded and without bodyguards in some of the world's most dangerous locations, he has managed to achieve a rare closeness with his interview subjects, a sense of intimacy with soldiers and other combatants even in the midst of ongoing violence. Unflinching and exquisitely written, "The Secret Life of War" goes beyond classic reportage: it is a deeply personal and defining vision of the inner, secret nature of modern war.