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My Battle of Algiers
Ted Morgan
In My Battle of Algiers, an eminent historian and biographer recounts his own experiences in the savage Algerian War, an event all too reminiscent of America's present difficulties in Iraq.
Collins
February 2006
304 pages ISBN: 0060852240 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Ted Morgan recalls a war that we would do well not to
forget. A Yale graduate who had grown up in both France and
America -- he was then known as Sanche de Gramont and was
then a French citizen -- he was drafted into the French Army
and served in Algeria 1956 and '57. In this memoir, Morgan
relives the harrowing conflict in which every Arab was
considered a terrorist -- and increasingly, many were. As a newly minted second lieutenant, he spends months in the
back country -- the bled -- where everyone, including
himself, becomes involved in unimaginable barbarities. "You
cannot fight a guerrilla war with humanitarian principles,"
a superior officer tells Morgan early on. He beats up and
kills a prisoner who won't talk and may have been
responsible for the death of a friend. He kills another man
in a firefight. He sees men die in encounters too small to
be recorded, ones that his fellow soldiers quickly forget.
For Morgan, the memories will never go away. Later, in Algiers, Morgan's journalistic experience -- he
had spent all of four months as a reporter on the Worcester,
MA, Telegram -- gets him a job writing for an official
newspaper. He lives through the day-to-day struggle to put
down an Arab urban insurgency, the first in modern history,
with its unrelenting menu of bombings, assassinations,
torture, show trials, executions, and the deliberate
humiliation of prisoners. He misses death when a beach
casino explodes just as he is going in for lunch. He becomes
disillusioned with the war and what it is doing to his
country. He is himself arrested, but not for the real
offense he committed, helping a deserter to escape. Though the events Ted Morgan describes so vividly happened
nearly half a century ago in Algiers, they might as well
have taken place in Baghdad today.
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