This is a great book. Here’s my favorite story so far:
‘"We’ve got this girl here in the company – blonde, she’s hot," the captain said. "This is when we were up in Mosul. We had to search all these villages for guns. Those villages are awful up there. So we went into this village and put the blonde girl we had on top of one of the Bradleys. We just rolled in and put her up there and took off her helmet and let her hair spill out.
So she’s standing there on top of the Bradley, blond hair and everything, and we called out on the loudspeaker, ‘This Woman is for sale. Blond woman for sale!’ And I’ll be damned if every Iraqi male in that village wasn’t gathered around the Bradley in about minutes. You know the Iraqis are crazy for blondes. Crazy for them. They don’t have any there."’
"So she’s standing up there on the Bradley, and we’d have an auction. Highest bid gets the blonde! They’re going crazy, the Iraqis, offering their goats, trucks, all their money. Children. Everything. I’m standing up there, saying, "Nope, not enough! Not enough!’ And they’re bidding more…
"So we’re up there having the auction, and during the auction I sent our guys around back into the houses to look for guns. We’re having the auction and all the Iraqis are at the auction yelling for the blonde while our guys are collecting the gun from the houses. It was totally quiet in the houses, just the women in there."
What happened with the auction?
"We just shut it down… We did that in three villages. Worked every time. We got reprimanded. Somebody found out about it."
Luke says: The Iraqis seem like such a bunch of savages, it seems a shame to have spent so many good American lives and dollars to help them out.
I can’t stop raving about this book. It is mesmerizing. It is hard to put down. This book is horrifying. Gritty. Real. I can’t believe the courage of the man who wrote it. I could never do what he did.
