From Kandahar to Sarajevo and the forests of Lithuania to the Congo’s boot camps, these short stories weave a dark and disturbing web, interlacing documentary accounts with imagined testimonies to give a voice to the many silenced casualties of war. An elderly woman on a bus tells a love story drawn from the depths of Soviet history; a soldier returns from his first tour of duty unsure he deserves his hero’s welcome; and a Norwegian immigrant pieces together a family history fractured in the aftermath of Nazi occupation. These are just some of the stories that, individually, bear witness to a thirst for conflict that seems both unquenchable and foreign. Together, they bring the question of collusion and responsibility all the way back to the reader’s own doorstep.