Set in 1916, Far Bright Star follows Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, as he leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong and the patrol is brutally attacked. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert.

Through him we enter the conflicted

...

Technology is changing the way wars are fought. Unmanned robots are used to drop bombs, launch missiles, and are even used in ground combat . . . but if things go wrong, who's really to blame? In the ever-challenging deserts of Iraq, US army officer Nathan Dixon comes face to face with the future of warfare. Assigned to investigate a friendly fire incident involving a rogue unmanned ground combat vehicle, Dixon finds that behind every action...

"Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn...

Larkin Bennett has always known her place, whether it's surrounded by her loving family in the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest, or riding on a dusty convoy in Afghanistan. But all that changed the day tragedy struck her unit and took away everything she held dear. Soon after, Larkin discovers an unexpected treasure: the diary of Emily Wilson, a young woman who disguised herself as a man to fight for the Union in the Civil War. As Larkin struggles...

"US Navy UCAV (drone) Air Boss Alicia Rodriguez and Lieutenant Karen 'Bunny' O'Hare are stranded on a decommissioned US UCAV facility on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait when Russia launches a lightning operation to shut down the critical waterway between Alaska and Russia to traffic and deny the US navy access. They are alone, dug in deep and trapped behind enemy lines. Surrender? Hell no."--Publisher's description.

Lieutenant Colonel Sean Drummond, a cocky U.S. Army lawyer who's not afraid to be blunt, finds himself up to his neck in a case he didn't ask to take. Five U.S. soldiers, tasked with guarding Iraqi prisoners, stand accused of committing depraved atrocities against their charges. Drummond is assigned to defend one of them: a hardscrabble young woman who is either incredibly naive or deceptively evil, and whose incriminating photos made the case an...

Secrets trail an American soldier from his Depression upbringing to the cold winter battles in the Ardennes Forest in the last months of World War II, and through the post-war decades, as he struggles to keep his family from being torn apart while keeping the truth buried close to his heart. Clay Brock, proprietor of Jake's Tavern, has endured terrible losses throughout his life. In 1964, he is working to build a life for his wife and son, only to...

The first of these two stories was originally published in the New Yorker in 1955. The second was originally published in 1959 in the same magazine.