Book excerpt: "Indonesians declared national independence in 1945, just days after the Japanese surrender that ended the World War II. Over the next five years the population would find itself engaged in a struggle for independence against the Dutch colonialists who sought to retake their former colony. This was a time of military mobilization, diplomatic negotiation, low intensity guerrilla warfare, as well as social turbulence, collective aspiration, and internecine violence. By 1950 the Dutch had been defeated, and the Republic of Indonesia was born, constituting the first successful war of anticolonial liberation in post-World War II Asia. Rifle Reports is a historical ethnography of everyday life during this extraordinary time, recalled in stories of the people who lived it. It is an anthropological study of gender during wartime; it is also an inquiry into storytelling both as memory practice and as ethnographic genre: how stories are told and received, how past events are recalled, how the art of narration constitutes its subject--in short, how stories inhabit social space. Matters of form and style, poetics and politics, genre and storytelling are just as critical to the author's analysis as matters of historical accuracy and authentication"--