The virtuous among us

Everbody had to read Plato, Aristotle and the like back in college. If you didn't you probably went to some hippie school that doesn't like dead white males. If you studied international relations, you almost certainly also had to read Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It's a good if challenging read, if you have lots of time on your hands. If you want something written from the modern perspective you might look at Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other. Thanks to some of the things he has written on NRO, I've always taken Hanson as an ideologue, but none of that is evident in this book. He doesn't present a political/strategic narrative of the war's main events, but rather uses a thematic approach to describe how the war was fought and how it was experienced by warrior and citizen alike. It helps to have a little background on the overall history as to illustrate each theme (terror, plague, and so on) he jumps backward and forward throughout history.

One of my favorite books to detail the daily lot of soldiers in difficult circumstance is Touched with Fire, written by Eric Bergerud. He writes about American and Australians fighting in New Guinea and the South Pacific islands. It's like Vietnam with fewer amenities.