Cirrus@Austlit

'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.' (Publisher's description)

'One car, one caravan, one kid, one continent...

'Greg Bearup and his partner Lisa Upton survived three years living together in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but life with the Taliban was nothing compared to taking a toddler to Caravanastan.

'Following the trail of the superannuated wildebeest, they wind up the jockey wheel, check the safety chains and hitch up the van for the great lap of Australia with their baby son, Joe.

'Along the way they park the van behind the Dagwood Dog stand and run away with the showies, break down in croc-infested waters, talk iambic pentameter with the great poet Les Murray, share tunes with John Butler and pimp Lisa to a brothel in the Pilbara.

'Their blue-eyed, blond-haired little boy has his own adventures: charming madams, attempting to swim with man-eating reptiles, and escaping in dramatic fashion from the van.' (From the publisher's website.)