They Will Have to Die Now
Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate
James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis’ last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year, nor that it would become, in the words of the Pentagon, “the most significant urban combat since WWII.”
They Will Have to Die Now takes the listener into the heart of the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time. We see unspeakable violence, improbable humanity, and occasional humor. We meet an Iraqi major fighting his way through the city with a bad leg; a general who taunts snipers; an American sergeant who removes his glass eye to unnerve his troops; a pair of Moslawi brothers who welcomed the Islamic State, believing, as so many Moslawis did, that it might improve their shattered lives. Verini also relates the rich history of Iraq, and of Mosul, one of the most beguiling cities in the Middle East.
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The Doctor
Many of the patients at Mother of Mercy walk for days in order to arrive at the hospital’s gates. Others are carried by friends, or survive the jarring ride over dirt paths in the back of the rare pickup that exists in the Nuba Mountain region of southern Sudan. Most are victims of the war that has been waged from the air against the people of Nuba by the Sudanese government for years. All Nubans know to seek refuge in a foxhole when they hear the drone of the bombers overhead; and they all know, in the aftermath, is to bring the maimed to Dr. Tom Catena, the only surgeon for thousands of square miles.
Dr. Tom, as he’s known throughout Nuba, has lived at the hospital for seven years. Aside from the walk that he makes each morning to a small chapel, he rarely leaves Mother of Mercy. He spends his days amputating limbs, sewing up wounds, and saving lives that would surely have no chance of being saved if it weren’t for Catena and the Nuban staff that, with no formal education, have learned to treat the horrors that come through their doors every day.
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Love and Ruin
Nothing about the romance between Nancy Hatch Dupree and Louis Dupree was what you’d call typical. For starters, there were the lovers themselves. Louis was a foul-mouthed paratrooper turned swashbuckling archaeologist. Nancy was a witty travel writer and the wife of a CIA station chief on the ragged frontier of the Cold War. Then there was the place and time: Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1960s, a heady and short-lived milieu of conniving spies, future mujahideen, and cocktail-swilling cosmopolitans.
It was there that Nancy and Louis fell in love not only with each other, but also with Afghanistan itself. The country was as exceptional and difficult as they were-and when it descended into chaos, they had no choice but to follow it. In Love and Ruin, journalist James Verini travels to Afghanistan in search of the Duprees’ story, an exhilarating and heartbreaking tale of lives lived to the fullest in one of the world’s most fascinating and forbidding places.
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