SOLDIER DEAD: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen

This is not a book for the faint of heart; Sledge's subject, from which he does not stray far throughout this dense work, is battlefield death and what becomes of soldiers' corpses. He presents a deeply researched, detailed history that features many photos, most of them depicting either freshly dead or decayed bodies of American military men arrayed on battlefields, mainly from the Civil War, the Korean War and WWII. That includes shots of the remains of GIs disinterred from cemeteries in Germany, unburied remains on a WWI battlefield in France, and African-Americans collecting the bones of dead soldiers on the Chancellorsville battlefield in Virginia. These photos, to say the least, do not make pleasant viewing. In his narrative, Sledge carefully and conscientiously examines such thorny questions as why soldiers put their lives at risk to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades and why the American military continues to expend enormous funds and personnel hours searching for the remains of Americans killed in the Vietnam and Korean wars. Oddly for a serious-minded book of this sort, Sledge injects himself, and his quest to find the answers to these questions, into the narrative in a very personal introduction and extended "Author's Notes" at the end of each chapter. The author recounts a "nighttime vision" he had of a dead soldier that led him to write the book and a dream he had three months later in which a room full of junior high school students in uniforms stood mutely before a large black door. 8-city author tour. (May)