Writer's Block

The Long Road Home

I don't give up on books lightly, but I finally set aside my latest Haruki Murakami book, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, after failing to make it halfway through after three weeks. I'm a pretty fast reader, so if I'm still working on something by the time it comes due at the library, I'm usually just not that into it.

Instead, I picked up a book that's been on my shelf for a while, The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz, about an ambush on the First Cavalry Division in Sadr City in 2004. The book is based on extensive interviews with the survivors, and Raddatz also got permission to use some of their personal letters and e-mails.  It's a really great piece of journalism, and gives you some kind of idea just how intense, scary and agonizing it is to be a soldier fighting in Baghdad. It also helps the reader know the soldiers as real people, and shows the anguish of separation on their families. I'm as bad as anyone at following news of the war in Iraq from day-to-day, but I do think that as the war enters its fifth year, those of us who are safe at home owe it to the people over there to learn about what's going on, try to understand, and not forget about it.

A couple other good reads on the subject are One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, who coincidentally was a year ahead of me at Dartmouth, and Generation Kill by Evan Wright -- two great books to read together, since Fick was a lieutenant who led a platoon into Iraq in 2003, and Wright was a reporter for Rolling Stone embedded with the same unit. I also really enjoyed War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres, which manages to be a funny account by a leisure-loving Hollywood reporter who gets drafted as his paper's war correspondent.