＊"Colby Buzzell is the voice of a generation. We can read a thousand dispatches from Iraq, but we will never know the war－or ourselves－as we will after reading My War." －－Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers

Like many young men of his generation, Colby Buzzell was without a job, living at home with his parents. He spent his time hanging out at the skateboardpark and krinking asmuch as humanly possible. Tired of the monotony and without any inspiring prospects, he decided, like his father before him, to join the Army. Witin months he was in lraq, hanging out of a Stryker vehicle, banging wasy with an M240 Bravo machine gun-and he found that he had something to say.

This is the startlingly honest story of a young man and a war. Once he was deployed near Mosul with the 1st Battalion, 23rd Regiment, Buzzell toted heavy weaponry into "guerrilla warfare, urban style," and was struck by the absurd, often frightening world around him. He began writing a blog to make sense of his experience - and to make clear the ways in which it differed form what was being reported in the news and intelligence briefings from Washington,D.C.

The result is an extraordinary narrative, rich with unforgettable scense: the raid on an lraqi home during which a woman couldn't stop screaming; the fierce firefight where the resistance came for the first time from "men in black"- obviously AI Qaeda: the hesitation of a young soldier too scared to fight: and the time spent chain-smoking in the guard tower, counting tracer rounds being fired over the city. And as the popularity of Buzzell's blog grew, it became clear that he had become the embedded reporter the Army couldn't control, despite its best, and often hilarious, efforts to do so.

 

My War is the debut of fresh and remarkable voice. one already being compared to Michael Herr's Dispatches and Joseph Heller's Catch-22, classics of youth and combat. But it is much more than a war story; it is the story of a generation caught between the hyperreality of a technological age and an ever more complicated and dangerous world. Before enlisting in the Army at age twnety-six, Colby Buzzell lived in the San Francisco Bay area. He servedfor two years, including about a year in lraq, and now lives in Los Angeles.