"doing your duty can be destructive of your soul"

The Iraq War has now gone on longer than World War II, so in addition to the slew of movies coming out on the war there are also more and more soldier's memoirs hitting the shelves. Usually the ones by enlisted men and junior officers are more revealing and make for better reading than the ones by the generals. Going back to the American Civil War, books like Co. Aytch by Sam Watkins and All for the Union by Elisha Hunt Rhodes are minor masterpieces compared to the self-serving memoirs of generals like McClellan and Longstreet. That's still the case according to this story from Morning Edition. Some of the excerpts are astoundingly good.