LAUSR

The British Ministry of Defence wanted to stop publication of the book. (It is therefore not by accident that it had to be published in the United States.) The attitude of the Ministry could not be based on descriptions of the medical personnel, who are presented as true heroes, in a realistic rather than an idealized way. It is the absurdities behind the war that must have irritated the Ministry. As de Rond noticed, describing difficult decisions concerning the fate of the wounded Afghans, ‘one budget is used to save those a different budget tried to kill only a moment ago, both propped up by the same tax revenues’ (p. 11). All in all, de Rond’s study is a good illustration of what Bruno Latour (2005) suggested long ago, despite many scholarly protests: we (organization scholars in this case) do not conduct our studies in order to present our results to people we have studied. It is more than likely that they know what they are doing. It is for everybody else, for those who do not know. Doctors at War should be read by anyone who hasn’t seen a war.