My battle of Algiers

by Ted Morgan

Historian and biographer Morgan recalls a war that we would do well not to forget, recounting his own experiences as a French soldier in the savage Algerian War in 1956-1957. A Yale graduate who had grown up in both France and America, he relives the harrowing conflict in which every Arab was considered a terrorist--and increasingly, many were. He spends months in the back country, where everyone, including himself, becomes involved in unimaginable barbarities. "You cannot fight a guerrilla war with humanitarian principles," an officer tells him. Later, in Algiers, his brief journalistic experience gets him a job writing for a newspaper. He lives through the day-to-day struggle to put down the first Arab urban insurgency in modern history, with its unrelenting menu of bombings, assassinations, torture, show trials, executions, and the deliberate humiliation of prisoners. Though these events happened half a century ago in Algiers, they might as well have taken place in Baghdad today.--F