Martha Raddatz: The Hero Next Door
ABC News chief global affairs anchor Martha Raddatz presents intimate portraits of military service members, drawn from decades of embedded reporting on war.
Why we picked this
Raddatz has spent more time embedded with U.S. forces than almost any other network anchor — what she's writing now is not policy analysis but portraiture, which is a more honest accounting of what service actually costs.
Martha Raddatz has been ABC’s chief global affairs correspondent and anchor for decades, with an unusual career spent as much in forward operating bases and military hospitals as in press briefings. That proximity — to soldiers, to families, to the specific physical and psychological costs of sustained combat — informs “The Hero Next Door,” which turns away from geopolitical framing and focuses instead on the individuals who carry out the policies that Washington debates.
The book is built from years of intimate reporting: portraits of service members and their families that resist the compressed narratives of either patriotic tribute or anti-war argument. Raddatz is interested in specificity — what this person did, what it cost them, what their life looked like afterward — and that specificity is what distinguishes the project from the category of military nonfiction that tends toward either hagiography or analysis.
An afternoon event at Politics and Prose, free and open to the public. Washington audiences tend to bring particular attention to discussions of military policy and experience, which makes this a venue well matched to the material.