Joker One (Donovan Campbell 2009)

The subtitle says it all: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood.
I suspect the original draft had a lot more military jargon (Mr. Campbell used just enough to give civilian readers a sense of the alien context, but not so much as to make the text inaccessible).

The book is well worth reading for its perspective on urban guerrilla warfare where the occupying soldiers quixotically seek to win hearts and minds without any knowledge of the local language and no connections to the culture.

There are also interesting reflections on love from a Christian in combat:

[The Marines of Joker One] loved one another and their mission -- the people of Rimaldi -- in a way that I didn't fully appreciate until just a few days before we left the city.... A good portion of the city's residents hated us just for being American, and a smaller but still sizable chunk of them actively tried to kill us every day. Why would anyone want to risk his
life to help these people? How could anyone love them? ...

[F]or my men, love was something much more than emotion. For them, love was expressed in the only currency that mattered in combat: action -- a consistent pattern running throughout the large and the small, a pattern of sacrifice that reinforced the idea that we all cared more for the other than we did for ourselves. For them, love was about deeds, not words.... 

As time went on, these small acts [of sacrifice] -- so many of which I either failed to notice or simply took for granted -- created something in Joker One that was more than just the sum of all of us. ...  

For me, then, loving Joker One ... meant much more than simply feeling that I cared. It meant patience... kindness ... mercy ... dispensing justice and then forgetting that it had been dispensed, punishing wrong and then wiping the slate clean. ... 

Sometimes [love] meant simply putting one foot in front of the other on patrol. And sometimes it meant continuing the mission when you didn't see any progress, meant protecting the defenseless, refraining from pulling the trigger, putting yourself at greater risk, doing what you knew to be right even though you didn't really want to. 

So that was how we loved those who hated us; blessed those who persecuted us; daily laid down our lives for our neighbors. No matter what we felt, we tried to demonstrate love through our daily actions. Now I understand more about what it means to truly love, and what it means to love your neighbor -- how you can do it even when your neighbor literally tries to kill you.

Donovan Campbell, Joker One, chapter 37.

It seems to me that he has nailed it; men do in fact love through actions, not words. Genuine love (as opposed to the cheap, synthetic version) is not the mere creature of emotions, which are inherently changeable, but is built on choices large and small, day in and day out.

And though it is hard to see Marines as turning the other cheek -- they are after all fully armed, hunting down insurgents and ready to return fire -- the self-sacrifice described here is nonetheless a distinctly Christian love.