Exit Wounds: One Australian's War on Terror

Author(s): John Cantwell; Greg Bearup

Military History

John Cantwell, Queensland country boy, enlisted in the army as a private and rose to the rank of major general. He was on the front line in 1991 as Coalition forces fitted bulldozer blades to tanks and buried Iraqi troops alive. He served in Baghdad in 2006 and saw what a car bomb does to a crowded marketplace. He was commander of Australian forces in Afghanistan in 2010 when ten of his soldiers were killed. He came home in 2011 to be considered for the job of chief of the Australian Army. Instead, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Exit Wounds is the deeply human account of one man's tour of the War on Terror, the moving story of life on a modern battlefield: from the nightmare of cheating death in a field strewn with mines, to the utter despair of looking into the face of a dead soldier before sending his body home to his mother. Cantwell hid his post-traumatic stress disorder for decades, fearing it would affect his career. Australia has been at war for the past twenty years and yet there has been no stand-out account from these conflicts - Exit Wounds is it. Raw, candid and eye-opening, no one who reads this book will be unmoved.

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Product Information

Major General John Cantwell AO, DSC joined the Australian Army as a private in 1974. He served in the first Gulf War with the Coalition forces between 1990 and 1991, and in the second Gulf War in 2006 and 2007, where he was promoted to Deputy Chief of Army. In 2010 he served a twelve-month tour as the commander of Australian forces in Afghanistan. He was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross in the 2012 Australia Day Honours List. Cantwell retired from the Army in 2012 after 38 years of service. Co-writer Greg Bearup has been a feature writer at the Good Weekend for the past ten years and has twice been awarded a Walkley Award for his writing. In 2004/5 he took leave from his job and lived in Pakistan and filed for various newspapers including the Guardian. He also worked for the UN on various elections and lived in Syria, for the vote of Iraqi refugees, and Bamyan, in the remote mountains of Central Afghanistan.

General Fields

  • : 9780522864670
  • : Melbourne University Publishing
  • : Melbourne University Press
  • : 0.402
  • : October 2013
  • : 197mm X 132mm X 32mm
  • : Australia
  • : October 2013
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : John Cantwell; Greg Bearup
  • : Paperback
  • : updated edition
  • : en
  • : 956.70443092
  • : 398