In the 1990s, most Americans had never heard of Bosnia, didn’t know a Croat from a Serb and couldn’t locate Yugoslavia on a map, even though Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing a euphemism for state-sponsored genocide had produced the bloodiest European conflict since World War II. The mounting casualties were humiliating to leaders of the West, particularly to President Clinton, who in his inaugural address had promised that when the will and conscience of the international community is defied, we will act with peaceful diplomacy whenever possible, with force when necessary. The problem was that Clinton and his senior people were preoccupied with the economics of domestic policy and had developed no clear foreign policy. How the U.S. groped its way through this dilemma is the major focus of War in a Time of Peace, a work that adds to the legendary status of David Halberstam as an author and historian. His latest book is a fascinating examination of the dynamics of U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War, a period extending from one President Bush to another.

As he did in The Best and the Brightest, the number one national bestseller about the Vietnam War, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Halberstam probes the bureaucracy to reveal the interplay between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress. His perceptive portraits of powerful U.S. and foreign government officials and military officers offer clues to explain not only what they did, but why they did it. He relates their tactics, thoughts and personal dramas. For example, we learn that Defense Secretary William Cohen, the sole Republican in the Cabinet, managed to stir Clinton to action on a critical decision to bomb Iraq by not-so-subtly suggesting to him that any delay would show the world that his troubles with Ken Starr had paralyzed him. We learn that hard-liner Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher’s successor, didn’t mind that her colleagues referred to the Kosovo campaign as Madeleine’s War but was irked that the use of her first name hinted of sexism. And Halberstam tells of Milosevic’s pointing a gun to his head and threatening suicide while his daughter shouted, Do it, Daddy! Don’t surrender, Daddy! before police took him away. Halberstam’s last 11 books have attained New York Times best-seller status. War in a Time of Peace might well make it an even dozen.

Alan Prince is the former editor of the Miami Herald’s International Edition.

The Associated Press, which prides itself on speedy reporting, appalled the civilized world on September 29, 1999, when it broke a half-century-old story. The news report claimed that U.S. military forces massacred as many as 400 civilians in the early days of the Korean conflict. According to the report, the slaughter denied by the Army and hushed up for years occurred in July 1950 in the South Korean hamlet of No Gun Ri. The story earned the Pulitzer Prize for reporters Sang-Hun Choe, Charles Hanley and Martha Mendoza. In The Bridge at No Gun Ri, these wire-service staffers have added depth and breadth to their initial account. They tell how aging U.S. veterans and surviving Koreans have tried to cope with haunting memories and tragic losses. The result is an even-handed and engrossing account of the carnage and its consequences.

Why the massacre? U.S. troops feared enemy soldiers had donned peasant clothes and joined civilian refugees streaming southward toward American lines. Without a way to identify disguised infiltrators, the U.S. plan to eliminate them became simple: Kill everyone. When a large group of refugees paused to rest near a bridge, American planes strafed them, killing about 100. Hundreds of others, most of them children, women and old men, managed to take cover beneath the bridge. In the next three days, some 300 were shot to death. The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies, recalls a survivor.

The three writers, combing through thousands of documents and conducting hundreds of interviews, established a clear record of the atrocities. Their findings triggered a U.S. investigation leading to an expression of regret from former President Clinton.

The Korean survivors’ emotion-stirring tales show how innocent victims driven by the power of family love managed to persevere despite their irreparably damaged lives. When the book is closed, one question is likely to linger in the reader’s mind: Could I have kept on going as they did?

Ex-newsman Alan Prince served in the Army during the Korean War.