For Memorial Day, we talk with veteran and scholar Andrew Bacevich about America, war, and the world: troops, leaders, and fateful choices.

Frontline dispatches from where the fighting never ends. New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins on Iraq, Afghanistan, and “The Forever War.”

Reporter Farnaz Fassihi talks about ordinary Iraqis during the war’s darkest days.

Memorial Day is a day for remembering and honoring the sacrifices of American military men and women in war. On this Memorial Day, there is no shortage of sacrifice to consider.
In wars since 9/11, thousands have died. More than 400 in Afghanistan. More than 4,080 now in Iraq.
In March this year, when the U.S. military’s [...]

For most Americans, the sacrifices made by service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are — after all these years — still out of sight and far away.
For colleagues, for comrades in arms, those sacrifices are as close as a man’s last breath. A woman’s last word.
Memorial Day honors sacrifice across many generations. But [...]

Telling the story of war is an art, and a jumble. Today, we see television images of shock and awe, bloody children’s slippers, troops at dangerous work, and the sad toll of suicide bombers.
In the heart of the 20th century, it was World War II that gripped the planet. And among its most artful chroniclers [...]

In our post-9/11 world, religion is often seen as one of the most divisive forces. And for good reason. Religious extremism drives conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq, fuels terrorism from Europe to Sri Lanka, and makes enemies of Israelis and Arabs.
And yet, says scholar Alan Wolfe, the world is not headed for a new era [...]

For too many of us, it’s the forgotten war. High up along the rocky ridges of eastern Afghanistan, American soldiers are fighting a grueling fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. And they’re doing it the old-fashioned way: up close and personal.
In the Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous places in the world for [...]

You know the news out of Iraq these days: the surge seems to be working, at least for now. Some refugees are trickling back in. The U.S. military complains that Iraq’s politicians aren’t doing their part to stabilize the country. Foreign jihadis are on the run. There’s still not much oil flowing.
To Iraqi citizens these [...]

One point six million American military service members have now been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. When they come home, they are veterans of those wars. And their struggles to reintegrate and recharge are part of the cost of those wars.
For the last year, NPR correspondent Daniel Zwerdling has been digging into how we and [...]

September 16, Nisour Square, Baghdad. Heavily-armed guards from Blackwater USA, on the job, opened fire, and left seventeen dead: men, women, and children.
In the weeks since, the world has opened fire on Blackwater, and the exploding, multi-billion dollar realm of super-charged private armies that it represents. The “mercenary industry” is the new tag. Gunfire, and [...]

Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya was a passionate, powerful advocate of American intervention in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. He laid Saddam’s crimes before the world, begged for action, dreamed of the democracy that could be.
He promised George Bush in the Oval Office that American soldiers would be greeted with “sweets and flowers” in [...]

War by war, icon by icon, public television documentarian Ken Burns is putting his trademark video stamp on American history.
With his colossally popular renderings of the Civil War and baseball, Mark Twain and jazz, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark and more, Burns — often with collaborator Lynn Novick — is shaping our collective memory of [...]

In the neoconservative camp that pushed for war with Iraq, Norman Podhoretz is a great patriarch, one of the old originals. But he’s hardly out to pasture. He’s a senior adviser to Rudy Giuliani. He counsels George W. Bush in the White House.
And here’s what he’s saying. We are in the midst of World War [...]

Americans overwhelmingly say they oppose the war in Iraq, but the war in Iraq goes on.
So, where’s the antiwar movement?
Well, it’s all over — and nowhere. It’s in Congress, among Democrats and some Republicans. It was in the streets of Washington, D.C. this weekend, with a few thousand protestors chanting and marching. It was in [...]

Later this week, the President will address the nation with his onward vision for the U.S. military in Iraq. With a hard war in its fifth year, benchmarks unmet, and polls showing American disillusionment, it will not be an easy sell.
But the way is being paved before Congress this week in the testimony of General [...]