The Cold War's Proxy Battlegrounds

They called it a Cold War. For fourteen to twenty million people, it was simply the war that killed them.

For forty four years, the United States and the Soviet Union never fired a single shot at each other. Not one American soldier ever faced a Soviet soldier in open battle. Instead, the two superpowers fought their war on someone else's ground, with someone else's sons, in Korea and Vietnam, the Congo and Guatemala, Chile and Angola, Mozambique and Afghanistan, Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Cold War's Proxy Battlegrounds is the sweeping, meticulously documented history of the twelve wars that history forgot to call wars.

Retired General Patrick H. Dulles-Stone draws on declassified CIA files, United Nations truth commission reports, and decades of scholarship to reconstruct, in vivid and unflinching detail, how a distant ideological contest between Washington and Moscow became the deadliest and least remembered catastrophe of the twentieth century. Inside these pages, you will walk through the CIA plot that ended in the acid dissolved remains of an African prime minister. You will stand in a Guatemalan courtroom as a former dictator becomes the first head of state in history convicted of genocide by his own country's courts. You will watch the Soviet Union and the United States swap client states in the middle of a single war, abandoning old allies overnight when a better strategic bet appeared. You will read the International Court of Justice ruling that found the United States government guilty of violating international law, and the White House's blunt refusal to accept it.

This is not a textbook. It is narrative history written the way the best true stories are written, propulsive, specific, and impossible to put down, without ever sacrificing the rigor a subject this serious demands. Every casualty figure is sourced. Every atrocity is documented. Every quotation is real. What readers will discover: The three colonels who drew the line that still divides Korea today, and the war that killed up to three million people over a border that has not moved in seventy years. Why Che Guevara called his own African campaign an outright failure, and what that failure meant for the Congo's next three decades. How a single fruit company's boardroom connections helped trigger a coup, and then a thirty six year civil war, and then a genocide.

The archbishop assassinated at his own altar for begging soldiers to disobey orders to kill, and the twelve year war his murder opened. The scandal that nearly destroyed an American presidency, born from a covert scheme to fund one war with the profits of arming a country the United States had publicly embargoed. The Cold War's Proxy Battlegrounds does not ask you to choose a side. It asks you to see clearly what both sides cost the people who never got a vote in either capital. It is history written for readers who want to understand not just what happened during the Cold War, but who actually paid for it, and why so much of that price has gone unpaid in our collective memory ever since.

If you have ever wondered why a war that never technically happened managed to kill more people than almost any war that did, this is the book that finally explains it.