Customer Reviews

The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq

5 star:		(83)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I had the privilege of serving with Spc. Crawford in Iraq. His book tells it exactly like it was, with no holds barred. It covers everything from our supply inadequacies, to command mismanagements, to the reality of the war that the media never took the time to cover.

Crawford is a natural author, an expert at weaving an engaging story that grips the reader firmly and swiftly. In an age where the news media corporations are the only source most Westerner's have for news of the war, and the corrupt Arab news networks are the propaganda sources for the Middle East, Crawford's account of the Warrior battalion is a cutting, incisive, and TRUE representation of what REALLY went on over there. -

John Crawford's story might be something out of Hollywood (indeed, with the new FX series, `Over There', now playing, Crawford's story seems almost as if it had been lifted for that drama). Crawford is like many others - he joined the National Guard for college money, not to go abroad and fight a war (whatever happened to the days when the National Guard stayed at home? but I digress...) He was nearing graduation, newly married, and suddenly thrust into the middle of a war that was controversial at the start, and increasingly unpopular at home as it dragged on.

Crawford spent three years in the 101st Airborne division, and then enlisted in the National Guard as he entered college, primarily for the tuition assistance. In Fall 2002, he was activated and had to go. Like many, his expectation of a short tour of duty was frustrated - the promise of `three months, six at most' turned into more than a year abroad.

Crawford's tales are riveting and engrossing. Like many men and women abroad in the conflict, he had varying access to email and internet facilities, and was encouraged by an embedded journalist to submit his tales (those of his own experience, and his writing on the experiences of others who were also around him at the time) to places around the country.

Some stories are now familiar to people in the States - problems with equipment, problems with personnel, problems with understanding their role vis-à-vis the locals. Crawford says that his unit was so underequipped that they even had to get vehicles from other units; at one point, they had a confiscated SUV from which they'd knocked the doors out, and mounted a machine gun on it. Not military issue at all. Their flak jackets were Vietnam-era technology, and their rifles were decades old. He also talks of the scavenging and improvising that took place, including digging through landfills for spare parts. Crawford even said that the only way to get replacement uniforms and boots was to order them online - soldiers then had to pay for these themselves, unreimbursed. Tough conditions, indeed.

Through it all Crawford insists that he and his unit were good soldiers who were going to do their duty no matter what, even if they did feel at times like the poor step-child that nobody cared about.

`Imagine a war in which you can call home at the end of the day,' Crawford says - he'd call his wife at home after a hard day; she'd talk about cleaning up dog doo in the house, and he'd talk about cleaning up dismembered people on the street. During the major operation of the war, there was no easy communication, but during the occupation time, it was much more available. Crawford sees this as a mixed blessing - instead of keep concentration focused, often soldiers would be worrying about things at home, and that could present a problem. It would also reinforce just how far away home really was.

Crawford also writes about drug use - some were into steroids (he describes a few `roid-rage' incident times), and some were onto antidepressants or valium. These were readily available from pharmacies. Crawford's own use included valium and sleeping pills, to make sure that when he was supposed to sleep, he could.

Part of this was written while he was in country in Iraq and Kuwait, and it was finished when he returned to the United States. It is an important read, and fills in many of the gaps that one gets in coverage of the war from media outlets, both factual and fictitious.

I was attached to the 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad, I remember when Johns unit came to relieve us. I can say, I bought this book today after watching The Daily Show. I have not been able to put the book down the entire day. I just now stopped to go online and see if I could find out more about John. But I am pretty sure I will finish this book this weekend.
The storytelling was remarkable, I felt as if I was back along that river watching those drunks yelling and screaming. I would 100% recommend this story to move directly to hollywood. It would translate totally to cinema.
Especially being there, I think it truely hit me deep down. Thank you for telling this tale, I can do nothing but recommend it to all readers.

I bought this book the day after it hit the shelves, see John is my youngest brother, and having heard stories about his time in Iraq, and knowing some of what he went through, but also knowing he kept morbid stuff out of his stories to me, I knew this would be a powerful story. John's life changed forever when he got deployed, and hopefully over time the anger and frustration he felt will subide, and he will be able to get past the bad times. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone, excellent story telling.

After serving three years in the 101st Army Airborne Division, John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard as a way to pay his college expenses at Florida State University. On his honeymoon, only a few classes short of graduation, Crawford got word that his National Guard unit would be sent to Iraq to support the US and British invasion (which took place on March 20, 2003). Crawford was in Iraq for more than a year.

The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell is structured as a set of short stories that recount some of Crawford's experiences in Iraq. This is a successful format for recounting an experience that had little logic while Crawford was living it and probably less in retrospect.

Generals and journalist try to write accounts that provide some global view of events. Crawford's account is that of an infantryman on the ground, in the dust, dirt and fear. The book opens with a story about the invasion. Crawford's unit was trapped with a few other units in a dust storm. As night falls, with zero visibility and no anti-tank weapons, they are told that an Iraqi tank unit is headed their way. The dust is everywhere, clogging their weapons, which in any case would do little damage to the Soviet era tanks used by the Iraqi army. Crawford never finds out whether the tanks pass by his unit or just never show up in the area.

Crawford's unit spends the rest of their time in Iraq attempting to provide security in Baghdad. Several of his stories involve the time his unit spent policing two Iraqi gas stations. The Iraq that Crawford describes is a shattered third world country. The Baghdad he inhabited was a city of hovels and crumbling apartments. A dangerous city of dust and filth. The overall color is the brown of desert sand, a city almost devoid of trees. Crawford's picture of Iraq brings home the surreal absurdity of the Bush administration's claim that Iraq was a "clear and present" danger to the United States, a country with a population over ten times that of Iraq, thousands of nuclear weapons and the most powerful military in existence.

Crawford's accounts are gripping, giving the reader some feel for his experience in Iraq. Crawford and his fellow National Guardsmen are bored, scared and desperately homesick. As National Guardsmen they are treated as second class soldiers. Their body armor is vintage of Vietnam era. Their officers are less well trained and less able than the regular Army officers. They are shifted from unit to unit, their Iraq departure date sifting with little obvious logic.

The enemy in Iraq is not an opposing army, but fighters who blend into the population. Crawford and his comrades are shot at from buildings and from the roadside by men who sometimes seem like ghosts. Crawford writes of the hate that is sometimes directed their way. The response to Iraq of these young, heavily armed men ranges from generous to brutal. Crawford gives the reader the feeling that without the oversight of the officers above these young men, there would be unrestrained carnage. They want to leave this strange land they have been sent to. Crawford writes that he would gladly kill an arbitrary number of Iraqis if it would get him home twenty minutes sooner.

Crawford's picture of himself and his fellows is not a picture of noble warriors. Their time in Iraq makes them desperate and brutal. Yet they are at their core honorable. The men and women in the US military are fulfilling the promises they have made. The brutality that emerges is the brutality that lives in all human hearts. As in any war, the military men and women in Iraq pay a terrible price. The toll exacted from them is not just death and physical injury. Marriages are shattered, businesses ruined and many of them will never be the same. Crawford writes of downing Valium by the handful, along with cheap Turkish whiskey and on one occasion beer taken from the Iraqis. As his stories unfold his marriage breaks up. By the end of his account, the blackness closes in on Crawford.

The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell is a short book. The stories sometimes repeat detail that Crawford has related earlier. This gives the book the feeling of a collection of reprinted stories. Perhaps because the details are simply too painful, some parts of the story are obscure. Crawford's wife, Stephanie, slowly draws away from him as the story progresses. Crawford's dream of a Penelope welcoming home her Ulysses is just that, a dream. But the reader never finds out what happens.

The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell and the other books by Iraq veterans that are starting to appear are important reminders of the sacrifices that our country is asking of our sons and daughters who are serving in the military. We owe them more than a "support our troops" bumper sticker. As a nation we should listen to their stories and hear of the price they have paid in our service. As a nation we should ask why they are paying this price. We should ask why a war that was started over Weapons of Mass Destruction became a war to install democracy and finally a war to install an "Islamic Republic" which may turn out to be no more democratic than its ally Iran.

As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I have recently been reading a number of books written by American soldiers who have fought in Iraq and books by imbedded reporters who have served some time with our troops. My objective is to get an idea of what this generation's ground troops are going through.

While I did get some sense of this in Crawford's book, I didn't get as much out of it as I have with others I've read. The stories are somewhat disjointed and some have a tone as if he were filling in data where he had forgotten how a story progressed. The dialog between characters reads as if written long after the incident and then created by the author, rather amateurishly, to flesh in the story.

If you're looking for a book on combat you won't find it here, though there is some blood and guts. Crawford's story is more about a soldier's slice of daily life - guarding service stations, getting high, chasing girls - and not a very good soldier, as noted by other reviewers.

Some have called this book a classic. I don't think so. I think the writing was technically poor in places and ineffective in others. It's obvious he tried to deliver an emotional punch at the end of many of his anecdotes, but for the most part they missed or landed ineffectively.

I do want to thank him for his service and wish him well in the future.

I have read the book, and skimmed the 127 reviews, fully reading only the negative comments. I found no declared OIF veteran denouncing the book, though several active and retired military members and one family member of a Marine did post unfavorable comments. I did find three members of Crawford's unit, and the father of a fourth, who praised the book - or at least the author.

Though denied by my youth an opportunity to serve in Vietnam I read obsessively the words of those who did, beginning when I stumbled upon Jim Morris's excellent memoir, "War Story: The Classic True Story of the First Generation of Green Berets" in the University of Arkansas bookstore in 1982. Robert Mason's Chickenhawk and Michael Lee Lanning's Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader's Journal of Vietnam soon followed. Then many others memoirs, and later histories such as Vietnam: A History, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam and About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.

While Mr. Crawford's book is not as memorable as those above, it has several virtues, and one excuse. The latter is the fact that it was produced so soon after his service. It is raw, as were his emotions while he wrote it. Given the last page (not the last chapter, which he notes is up to that point fictional), I cannot blame him.

Of its virtues, one of those also is that it is raw. Crawford successfully puts us into his boots, and sometimes into his skin, as he describes his experiences. Few have done that as well, though Robert Mason comes close.

A recent reviewer suspects that the people who praise this book have an anti-Iraq "war" bias. I agree. I suspect as well that the negative reviewers have a pro-Iraq "war" bias. Such is the state of the nation these days. We are deeply divided. Only by reading the words of the men and women who have fought in the war and later served in the occupation (the war having ended before the president declared an "end to major combat operations") and of past wars and occupations can we as Americans understand what we have wrought, and perhaps bring this nation back to its senses.

If you want to put this war and occupation into proper historical context, there is one more book you should read: War is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General. (The subtitle is misleading - he wasn't "anti-war", he was an anti-imperialist.)

I recently purchased his book, "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq," and found it riveting. I had a selfish reason for purchasing the book. A whole chapter was dedicated to a story I had heard from my son, who served with Crawford in Baghdad. My son, SPC Josh Mears, related the story to me after he had returned from Iraq. After reading the chapter, "The Bank," I am glad that Crawford credits my son in that chapter as one of those who was really respected for who they were. Throughout the book, Crawford alludes to the lack of respect that the soldiers had for some of their leaders and of politics involved during their tour of duty. It is a shame that there werent more leaders who commanded a soldiers respect simply by there presence. Dick Winters in " Band of Brothers " for instance. My son shared some of those stories. It doesn't matter how many medals are given a man, but it does matter if the man gained respect by earning it. And my son did. He should have gotten a bronze star for what he did. But politics reached far into a foreign, occupied land. It's all in the book. God bless those boys in Company A 3rd Battalion 124th Infantry, who became men on foreign soil, and the families who supported them while they were away. Shame on those elected officials who gave them outdated, faulty equipment, forgot them in the combat zone and those others who preyed on their constituents for their own agendas.

Crawford's book is essentially a chronicle of his tour in Iraq. I got nothing of the "cry baby" attitude mentioned by other reviewers. In many respects, it's a contemporary version of that classic story form, the futility and frustration in the everyday lives of soldiers. The problems come from command, policy, fellow soldiers, the enemy, and the everyday bystanders in the conflict. Crawford is not proud of everything he and his men do, but provides enough context for us to see why these things happen, even with reasonably good intentions. Crawford misses his wife; his fellow soldiers miss their girlfriends and family. This and the everyday annoyances such as the omnipresent heat and sand are handled in rather matter of fact ways. Crawford documents the heavy use of drugs in Iraq, which has been mentioned in other first person accounts. Death and injury hit close to home and they are described in direct, graphic terms. One gets a sense of the normalcy of ever present danger that comes form being in contested territory. Taken as a whole, it's a reminder of why people who've been to war don't like discussing their experiences and don't seek catharsis. The shortcomings of policies, procedures, and tactics are evident, with little need for analysis. The book is a relatively short, the writing is fluid, making it an easy, engrossing read---I read it on my daily commutes on the Washington Metro. Still, the imagery is stark and problems of living through a tour of duty linger after a reading is over. The ending is a little clumsy and forcibly literary, and some will object to the use of the derogatory "hajji" to describe the Iraqis, but I found these to be minor problems in comparison to the sweep of the book.

Those writing before me have given a good description of what to expect from this book and I won't repeat their summaries. After reading most of the book and feeling the many emotions he evokes from his superb descriptions I was almost relieved to be on the last chapter because I felt for him and his situation and I would soon know that his horrendous ordeal ended. The last chapter just blew me away; I never saw it coming. It says everything we need to know about this war, and every war. Read it! It's worth your time.