American, Interrupted is the name of the book written during Operation Iraqi Freedom from the war diary of former US Army Corporal Dan Thompson.

This book recounts Thompson's enlistment and service in the US Army during Operation Iraqi Freedom, during which he served as an operations specialist, driver, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) pilot with the 1st Armored Division. After leaving military service, Thompson went on to become a professional writer.

American, Interrupted is based on several war journals that Thompson wrote both before and during the war.

Description

American, Interrupted is a book containing the war journals of an American soldier during one of the longest U.S. Army deployments since World War II. Corporal Dan Thompson, a soldier with 3-32 AR tank battalion (fictional name) in Germany, takes you from the pre-war debate over weapons of mass destruction and the moral conflicts soldiers encounter in their personal lives to accounts of urban combat in the crowded streets of Baghdad, Sadr City, Kut and Najaf.

Beginning in April 2003, the Army corporal writes about his future role in the impending war on Iraq. Unable to decide whether or not he can kill countrymen of a nation that has not attacked the United States, he travels to Vatican City for clearer guidance than he is finding from the Bush administration. It is there he meets and befriends an Vatican monk who encourages him to protect his life and the life of others. "Go, and when you come back, become an instrument of peace," the monk tells him in this true account.

Weeks later, the corporal wrestles emotions of witnessing a nation at war and knowing that he too must go to Iraq. He leaves behind his fiancée, setting in motion a love story that grows throughout the book. The call is sent, and his tank battalion is sent to the Kuwaiti desert in preparation for movement into Baghdad. It was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission, but their over 14 months in the Middle East were anything but.

Thompson describes what it's like to live in the desert while thinking of what lay ahead. It is May 2003, and Baghdad has already fallen, but the city still awaits him and the 400 other men in his unit. The environment is hot, his thoughts are on the controversial invasion and the unit is getting a clearer picture of what its role is going to be in Iraq.

The corporal and his unit make the long, arduous road march up to Baghdad, stopping only a few times during the 18-hour drive. Some units had been attacked the day prior with rockets. He describes in arriving in occupied Baghdad -- the expressions on people's faces, the begging children and the uneasy tension in the air they found on Baghdad's streets. His observations about underlying tension prove almost prophetic in the months to follow. He arrives first at the infamous Baghdad parade grounds where human feces and abandoned Iraqi army uniforms litter every building and foxhole. He meets and speaks with soldiers who took part in the invasion weeks earlier, and recounts their stories of destruction and death. He takes the reader into the Saddam Hussein Museum of Gifts to Saddam Hussein and the abandoned National Performing Arts center shortly after being ordered to remove furniture from the crippled place.

Thompson's tank battalion makes an abandoned military academy its first home in June 2003. There he meets and slowly befriends homeless Iraqi children and begins to turn a looted Iraqi barracks room into a home. He takes the reader on detailed searches through abandoned chow halls and warehouses full of equipment and personal items left behind by retreating Iraqis. This portrait of a ghost town later becomes a transcript of early Iraqi exercises in Democracy as Thompson observes one of the first town hall meetings in "free" Iraq. He describes a heated meeting between rival tribes and conveys how complicated and emotional infant Iraqi freedom is.

All this time he is longing for his fiancée and making sense of his new first hand knowledge of Iraq and his previous, untested beliefs about Iraq. He continues to befriend more Iraqis and feels a deeper attachment to the country. As an operations specialist helping put the commander's orders into action on the ground, Thompson is processing and responding to an increasing number of hostile action reports. He desperately attempts to divert soldiers to rescue a kidnapped child one night, while receiving a report that Iraqi widows were unearthing 20 blue plastic bags full of their husbands' remains that were killed in the war. Story after story of mind-blowing and bizarre events fill the pages of his book; stories that the media never reported and soldiers were quick to forget. His wide access takes you from the halls of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad both before and after its bombing to the filthy pitch black streets of Baghdad.

Thompson's writing brings to life dozens of soldiers mentioned in his book. As Americans watch the anonymous faces of soldiers on television, Thompson's presentation of real-life soldiers makes those faces as real as brothers and friends. He describes how war affects soldiers and their families. From a sergeant who shoots a child for hitting him in the face with a rock to a caring sergeant major who dies on Christmas Eve, Thompson's life crosses paths with these people before they ever meet their fate. In an amazing account where sometimes he is talking to the living, and the next mourning the dead, Thompson's account descibes the hidden emotions behind the sorrow of soldiers.

The Army corporal isn't just sitting in the headquarters. The book describes how Thompson and his roommate are attacked with a roadside bomb. Thompson shares his thoughts and impulses as his convoy was hit with a grenade in the center of Baghdad and describes accounts of combat moments after chaos broke out in Sadr City in April 2004. The book describes many true accounts of pursuit, miscalculation, victory.

As Iraq slowly sliped into chaos in early 2004, Thompson writes about his everyday fears and the impending offensive on Najaf. He leaves his trusted Iraqi friends in Baghdad as his tank unit moved south to Al-Kut and moves into a television station. As Iraq slips into its darkest days since the invasion, his unit is sent even farther across Iraq to one of the holiest Shia cities, An-Najaf. It is there that the book describes in detail what is was like to live with the constant trickle of mortar fire and death. Thompson is sent to Kuwait on an emergency mission to learn how to fly and operate an unmanned aerial vehicle in a few days. He brings the UAV back into Iraq and lands in the Najaf desert in a cargo helicopter with an Apache gunship escort. His account tells of gathering intelligence, writing his journal while taking mortar fireand searching the abandoned and bloody Najaf city morgue for an air conditioner.

The corporal's final book brings him home to his unit in Germany, where the book then details what it is like to come home and rejoin his fiancée after being gone for over 14 months without leave. It also talks about the fallout of war and its effect on soldiers coming home.

Thompson's books offer a portrait of an American with a conscience. In this time of "clean" and "smart" war, his witness describes what he believes war is and will always be -- brutal and tragic.

External links

The official American, Interrupted Website

The American, Interrupted blog