I’m a soldier, an author, and an army wife – the last fifteen years of my life have revolved around dealing with the fallout of the Iraq war, not only for my family but also as a soldier and a veteran. I write books because I wanted to read about people who stayed in the military after the war started. The best writing advice I ever got came from Robyn Carr who said, write the book that only you can tell. Wrestling with the legacy of a war that we as soldiers did not choose as we return home was something I deeply wanted to understand, both as an army officer and a novelist.
Because of You – Welcome Home - these are the words every soldier longs to hear after an endless deployment. But for Sergeant First Class Shane Garrison, there’s no one waiting when he arrives back at Fort Hood, unconscious and barely hanging on. The IED that nearly took his life took something more important - something he’s afraid he’ll never get back. Back to You – Dying has a way of changing a man. Ever since the day Army captain Trent Davila lost his life, he’s been fighting the demons that haunt him. He’s left his wife and their two children behind as he’s volunteered to put himself in harm’s way until his wife had enough. As the fight for his career and reputation threatens to destroy them both, their marriage will be tested like never before.
I served in the 1st Cav when Black Sunday happened and then, a few years later, read this book as a newly commissioned second lieutenant, serving in 3HBCT, 1st Cavalry Division several of the men featured in Raddatz’s book.
It provided deeply personal insights into why the boss was driven the way that he was. It was absolutely devastating to read the horror of a lost platoon alongside the struggles of the families back home. Through deeply personal narratives, Raddatz drives home the importance of being prepared for the worst both for the soldiers deployed and the families back home, managing rumors and fear during a mass casualty event, and the will to stay connected to those you served with.
Coming up on the 20-year anniversary of Black Sunday, I give cadets who ask me to commission them a copy of this book – it reminds all of us of why everything we do is for that 18-year-old kid walking the streets.
ABC News’ Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz shares remarkable tales of heroism, hope, and heartbreak in her account of “Black Sunday”—a battle during one of the deadliest periods of the Iraq War.
The First Cavalry Division came under surprise attack in Sadr City on Sunday April 4, 2004. Over 7,000 miles away, their families awaited the news for forty-eight hellish hours—expecting the worst. In this powerful, unflinching account, Martha Raddatz takes readers from the streets of Baghdad to the home front and tells the story of that horrific day through the eyes of the courageous American men and women…
Lemmon’s book is about the reality of war for female soldiers (so obviously I’m biased)– when losing means not just going home to lick your wounds, but not having a home to go back to.
The Iraq War was a war of choice – the wars that the Daughters of Kobani are fighting are wars of necessity and survival. It’s not about dogma of saying women are just as good as men – it’s a powerful story about women who carry the same obligations of citizenship as the men around them and the drive and purpose to defend their home, their rights, and their families through violence if necessary.
It sits at the intersection of war and feminism in a way that everyone who cares about women’s rights absolutely must read.
The extraordinary story of the women who took on the Islamic State and won
"The Daughters of Kobani is an unforgettable and nearly mythic tale of women's power and courage. The young women profiled in this book fought a fearsome war against brutal men in impossible circumstances-and proved in the process what girls and women can accomplish when given the chance to lead. Brilliantly researched and respectfully reported, this book is a lesson in heroism, sacrifice, and the real meaning of sisterhood. I am so grateful that this story has been told." -Elizabeth Gilbert, author…
This is a book about failure – leadership failure from every echelon.
I hesitated to ever read this book about horrific war crimes committed by American soldiers because I absolutely did not want to see “them” as “us”. What I found instead was a systematic failure of the Army from every echelon that enabled these men to slip free of the bonds of civilization and become the embodiment of humanity’s worst impulses.
The soldier who reported them was nearly murdered as a traitor. This book speaks to the burden that those who come forward carry – and how men become monsters.
I don’t know if the men who committed that horrible atrocity were ever good men who the war made evil nor do I care – but what Frederick has shown in this book is the systematic unraveling of a platoon’s ties back to what made them human and the fact that no one seemed to notice until it was too late makes this book absolutely foundational reading for understanding how things went so very wrong in Iraq.
This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as “the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’s so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time.
Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring a chronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heart platoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, over their year-long tour of…
I adored this book because Junger not only dealt with the disassociation he felt with coming home from a personal perspective but because he – probably more accurately than anyone writing on veterans issues – identified the source of the problem facing America’s veterans.
His book resonated with me as a veteran because he called out the thing that so many of us felt lacking: the lack of purpose. The Iraq War was not a war of necessity – the leaders of our nation fabricated links to 9/11 to justify the invasion and subsequent decade – and it makes justifying the horrible things done during war that much harder.
That is not to say that previous generations did not face PTSD, unemployment, etc., and it’s also not to dismiss the real changes to the brain from TBI and other traumatic injuries and events.
But instead of treating veterans as a charity case that must become wards of the state because they are so damaged by war, Junger points out how veterans – and the society that sent them to war – can better answer the call for meaning and purpose in life after war.
From the author of THE PERFECT STORM and WAR comes a book about why men miss war, why Londoners missed the Blitz, and what we can all learn from American Indian captives who refused to go home.
Tribe is a look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the challenges veterans face returning to society. Using his background in anthropology, Sebastian Junger argues that the problem lies not with vets or with the trauma they've suffered, but with the society to which they are trying to return.
One of the most puzzling things about veterans who experience PTSD is that the majority…
This book technically isn’t about the Iraq war but instead, about violence more broadly and it's super nerdy but super important.
As a soldier and sociologist, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways academia deals with questions of violence. In particular, since the popularity of moral psychology theories like Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory (popularized in his book The Righteous Mind), the running assumption in a lot of academic circles is that harm = bad. But Fisk and Rai show that violence serves social purpose such as bonding people together or teaching them group boundaries.
It’s a difficult read because it challenges people’s assumptions about violence and harm but that makes it all the more important in understanding how people come home from war and the ways in which they wrestle with actions they’ve done.
What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt and kill others or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpetrators' minds, violence may be the morally necessary and proper way to regulate social relationships according to cultural precepts, precedents, and prototypes. These moral motivations apply equally to the violence of the heroes of the Iliad, to parents smacking their child, and to…
Tiny Tales is a collection of 365 bite-sized stories and poems, written each day of 2023 to a one-word prompt created by one of the official #vss365 (very short story, 365 days a year) ambassadors on Twitter ("X").
Tweet-sized (280 characters or fewer) storytelling (aka "Twitterature") inspires experimentation and variety, and that is exactly what you'll find in this collection of compositions ranging from true stories to playful limericks, romantic fiction to war-inspired tales, wistful observations from a long-ago childhood to fantastical imaginings of a distant future.
Whether you want to read a story a day or use the prompts (included in their original order at the end of the book) as a springboard to jumpstart your own writing, Tiny Tales will keep you entertained and inspired throughout the year. It is a perfect gift to yourself or for any aspiring or avid writer in your life.
Tiny Tales is a collection of 365 bite-sized stories and poems, written each day of 2023 to a one-word prompt created by one of the official #vss365 (very short story, 365 days a year) ambassadors on Twitter ("X"). Tweet-sized (280 characters or fewer) storytelling (aka "Twitterature") inspires experimentation and variety, and that is exactly what you'll find in this collection of compositions ranging from true stories to playful limericks, romantic fiction to war-inspired tales, wistful observations from a long-ago childhood to fantastical imaginings of a distant future.
Whether you want to read a story a day or use the prompts…
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