“[These] extraordinary stories and opinions range from the profound and the patriotic to the humorous and the heartbreaking. Dr. Tripp has done a masterful job of finding a diverse and thoughtful group of individuals and of weaving their oral histories together in a way that makes them, individually and collectively, unforgettable.”

—Andrew Carroll, editor of the New York Times bestsellers
War Letters and Behind the Lines

“"The book builds to two profoundly moving final passages about a soldier killed in battle and another who committed suicide after his return home. Engrossing reading that benefits from its simple format."

- Kirkus Reviews

The Iraq war is being fought by an all-volunteer army recruited from working-class America, ordinary citizens in uniform. Volunteers sign up with the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy as active duty, Reserve or National Guard, serving when as young as 18 and as old as 60. These men and women are the stars of Tripp’s powerfully moving book: Surviving Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories is the result of a close collaboration between the author and thirty veterans who volunteered to tell their stories of the invasion, occupation, and ongoing insurgency in Iraq.

These thirty in-depth narratives belong to the national dialogue on the war and also to a people’s history of the war. We find unvarnished views of the war’s conduct and its rationales, as well as of its commander in chief and his administration. Soldiers’ individual experiences range from the harrowing to the hilarious—all the indelible human detail of war. As fighters, soldiers must face urban warfare against an unidentifiable enemy; as women they must guard against assault from their male comrades; as military personnel they live on bases that have modern movie theaters, the internet, Burger Kings and Pizza Huts, all in the midst of a dangerous conflict. Almost a half a million soldiers have served in the four years of this war, but each story is unique, telling us what it is like to serve in war, and to survive it.

Read the Table of Contents:
The soldiers and their stories

Elise Forbes Tripp is a graduate of Harvard and has a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. A former international relations counselor for UN affairs at the World Bank, she is an adjunct professor of American history at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts.