by Ted Morgan


In MY BATTLE OF ALGIERS, Ted Morgan, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of numerous histories and biographies, recalls a war that we would do well not to forget.  The Algerian War for Independence from France is often identified as the birthplace of Islamic terrorism.  A bloody insurgency coupled with terrorist bombings and executions are all reminiscent of America’s troubles in Iraq today.

Although Ted Morgan was a Yale graduate who had grown up both in France and America, he was drafted into the French Army and served in Algeria in 1956-57 during the infamous Battle of Algiers.  In MY BATTLE OF ALGIERS Morgan relives that dark era when all Arabs were suspected terrorists and both sides committed unspeakable atrocities.  He spent months fighting in the back country--the bled—and became involved in unimaginable barbarities.  Morgan describes his involvement in the death of a prisoner under brutal interrogation.  The prisoner was suspected in the vicious killing one of Morgan’s close friends.  In another battle, he killed a man in a shootout.  Later, he helped another friend go AWOL from the army when the friend could not take the violence of the war any longer. 

Morgan eventually left the battlefield to serve undercover as a journalist for a French propaganda newspaper in Algiers.  It was here that he saw the terrorists’ tactics up close.  He nearly missed death by a terrorist bomb placed at a beachside casino just as he was going in for lunch.  He himself became disillusioned with the war and was eventually arrested and interrogated by French intelligence for socializing with American diplomats.  Although the events Morgan describes so vividly happened nearly half a century ago in Algiers, they might as well have taken place in Baghdad today.  Many of the insurgents’ tactics and the occupiers’ interrogation methods are the same in Iraq today.

MY BATTLE OF ALGIERS is a powerful retelling of a moment in history that holds many insights for Americans in a post 9-11 world.  In bringing that moment to life in vivid detail with insight and clarity, Morgan shows once again that he is a master storyteller. 

After reading the book rent Gilo Pontecorvos’s riveting reenactment of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS for a hair-raising foreshadowing of the inhumane events that populate our daily media coverage.