Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" is forcing Americans to face the horror of war. For many veterans the film is bringing to the surface memories and emotions they have suppressed and never been able to share, even with those closest to them. Hell, Healing, and Resistance: Veterans Speak, a devastating new book by Daniel Hallock, portrays the human cost of war with equal candor, but offers veterans and their families something Spielberg could not-healing. No one knows the human cost of war better than those who were there. In these accounts, veterans take readers through this century's battle fields and back home, revealing their inner scars and the ongoing suffering shared by their families and many others whose lives they touch. Many veterans feel betrayed and silenced by the country that demanded the ultimate sacrifice of its young men and women. Here, they speak from our nations homes, workplaces, hospitals, prisons, and homeless shelters, determined to spare the next generation from the scourges of war. For some, personal resistance to militarism has spelled a remarkable transformation of their lives, and filled them with vibrant hope and purpose. Yet veterans also seek healing. A starting place, they say, is to let veterans speak - to give them space to honestly confront the past. This book does that. Survivors of war allow us to enter into their quest for healing, and so are healed. In the words of one veteran: "I share my story to awaken my heart, to reclaim my life. It is the listening people around me who help me to remember what it's like to feel full and not empty, and to trust that feeling." Beyond this, the veterans in this book teach us that healing is far from an individual experience - it reaches out to embrace fellow veterans, family, friends - ultimately an entire culture. Their voices are joined by those of their wives and husbands, sons and daughters, and civilians caught in the cataclysm of the wars they fought. To listen to their stories is to open ! ours! elves to the call of the hour in the midst of a war-sick world.