Review: Exigent Circumstances: A Soldier’s Story

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Riveting, scary, bold, unflinching, stoic—and yes, at times gory — D Swami’s Exigent Circumstances is a hard book to look at and even harder to look away from. This is a soldier’s story told without cushioning.

The narrative moves with the urgency of a ticking clock, where lives are risked not for glory, but for a starving people who may never know the names of those protecting them. That moral tension—who is saved, who is sacrificed, and who decides—drives the book forward with relentless force.

The danger is constant and intimate. Swami puts the reader face-to-face with ambushes, exhaustion, and enemies who are neither abstract nor distant. The violence can be sadistic and gory, but it is never gratuitous; it reflects the brutal reality of facing an adversary that exploits cruelty as a weapon. These moments are unsettling precisely because the author refuses to flinch.

What elevates the book is its stoicism. Emotions are tightly controlled, spoken through action rather than confession. Fear is present, but subordinated to duty. Loss is absorbed, not dramatized. That restraint makes the story more powerful—and more haunting.

Exigent Circumstances is bold in its honesty and unflinching in its portrayal of what it means to stand between vulnerable civilians and imminent danger. It is a story of facing off against overwhelming threats with limited choices, where courage is measured not by survival, but by the willingness to move forward anyway.

This is not a comfortable read. It isn’t meant to be.

It is a stark, gripping account of war’s moral and physical costs—and the quiet resolve of those who bear them.