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John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college
tuition, willingly exchanging one weekend a month and two weeks a year for
a free education. But in fall 2002, one semester short of graduating and
newly married -- in fact, on his honeymoon -- he was called to active duty
and sent to the front lines in Iraq.
"We crossed the berm the same day as the Army's Third Infantry
Division, leading the invasion of Iraq. When the Third Division was sent
home, our National Guard unit was passed around the armed forces like a
virus: the 108th Airborne, First Marine Expeditionary, 101st Airborne, and
finally the First Armored Division. They were all sent home, heroes of the
war. Meanwhile, my unit stayed on, my soul rotting, our unit outlasted by
no one in our tenure there."
Crawford and his unit spent months upon months patrolling the streets
of Baghdad, occupying a hostile city. During the breaks between patrols,
Crawford began writing nonfiction stories about what he and his fellow
soldiers witnessed and experienced.
"The world hears war stories told by reporters and retired generals who
keep extensive notebooks and journals. They carry pens as they walk,
whereas I carry a machine gun. War stories are told to those who have not
experienced the worst in man. And to the listener's ears they can sound
like glory and heroism. People mutter phrases like, 'I don't know how you
did it.' And they look at you wondering how you have changed, wondering if
you have forever lost the moral dilemma associated with taking another
person's life."
In a voice at once raw and immediate, Crawford's stories vividly
chronicle the daily life of a young soldier in Iraq-the excitement, the
horror, the anger, the tedium, the fear, the camaraderie. But all
together, the stories gradually uncover something more: the transformation
of a group of young men, innocents, into something entirely different.
"I have too many stories to tell, and if just a few of them get read,
the ones that real people will understand, then maybe someone will know
what we did here. It won't assuage the suffering inside me, inside all of
us. It won't bring back anyone's son or brother or wife. It will simply
make people aware, if only for one glimmering moment, of what war is
really like."
Those stories became this book, a haunting and powerful, brutal but
compellingly honest book-punctuated with both humor and heartbreak-that
represents an important document revealing the actual experience of waging
the War in Iraq, as well as the introduction of a literary voice forged in
the most intense of circumstances.
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