Paul Shannon

Songs of Iraq: a Year Long Deployment Paul Shannon

Songs of Iraq is an extremely powerful and graphic collection of narrative poetry that tells you exactly what it was like to be in Iraq during the worst of the insurgency war. It is spare and breathless reading, beginning when a young soldier steps into theater and ending when he catches the Freedom Bird home and -- just like that -- the combat tour is ended. You will know what it is like to curl up on the floor of a concrete bunker as mortar rounds walk closer, to fight in a God awful, unbelievably hot place against an invisible enemy, to push through the X in an ambush of your convoy, to be bored out of your wits in a concrete-walled forward operating base, and to lose a buddy to a roadside bomb outside the wire, once you have read this book. Written by a longtime FBI agent who deployed more than once to Iraq, who fingerprinted and conversed with Saddam Hussein, who worked bomb scenes as if they were crime scenes and who lived side-by-side with our soldiers while under fire, this book will vividly put you in the boots of a soldier on the ground in Iraq.