#iyort

From trentreedy:

The other part of If You’re Reading This that resonates with me quite deeply is Mike’s relationship with his late father and with the war in Afghanistan. Like Mike, I never had the chance to say goodbye to my father, who was killed very suddenly and violently. I was only 20, and for the last summer of my dad’s life, I was in Army basic training. I never had the chance to get much adult advice from my father, and I’d give anything to get letters like Mike receives. The letter from Mike to his father at the end of the book is really from me to my father. I regularly have dreams in which my father is alive again. I think often about all the things my father wasn’t around for, especially now that his first grandchild is on the way. 

Also like Mike, I’m struggling to move past the war. I was in Afghanistan ten years ago, and instead of feeling as though I’m getting over the experience, I’ve become more and more emotional about Afghanistan as time has gone on. In fact, I was recently at the Spokane Veteran’s Outreach Center with my wife. I was alone in the waiting room, and it took a long time before I worked up the courage to walk up to the desk and ask the receptionist there if there was someone I could talk to about veterans’ emotional issues. I was shaking. It was a challenge to fill out the application.

If You’re Reading This is about healing, about trying to move on. About trying to say goodbye to this war and people we’ve lost. But it’s not just about soldiers who died, or soldiers like me who left part of their soul in that desert. It’s a celebration and an honoring of what we did over there. 

This war has meant depriving Al Qaeda of a home country, and as such we are safer here in the United States. But it has also meant helping the Afghan people find hope where before there was none. It’s about letting boys and girls go to school. It’s about improved roads, about cellular telephones and Internet in a land where before there was no electricity. It’s about keeping the Taliban off the people’s backs long enough so they can make a stand on their own. It’s about a little girl who can, at last, really smile. An entire generation of American children has grown up in an America at war, but an entire generation of Afghan children have grown up with more relative peace than the country had seen in the twenty years before we arrived. 

Our teenage readers have no memory of an America that is not at war, and we have a responsibility to help them understand what happened, what it was all about. A lot of our readers have sacrificed a lot, losing loved ones or doing a lot of growing up with their loved ones away. If You’re Reading This is for them, so that they can have a better idea of what this war has really meant.  People often rightly thank soldiers for their service, but I hope that If You’re Reading This also thanks military families for their sacrifice and support of that service. 

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From trentreedy:

A major thing drawn from my own experiences in If You’re Reading This comes from Derek’s description of the day Mike’s father died, starting on page 276. In the book, Derek and Mark’s squad is driving down a street in an Afghan town. An Afghan man signals at them to drive on a certain side of the road, but Derek second-guesses the Afghan man, thinking the way looks drier (the roads are all dirt/mud) on the other side. Their vehicle gets stuck and then they are attacked. In real life, I was up in the gun turret. I second-guessed the Afghan man and got us stuck.  But instead of attacking us, the good Afghan people came to help us dig out of the mud so that we could get our humvee on down the road. People sometimes say that the Afghans never wanted us in Afghanistan. I promise you that if the Afghans did not want us there, we would have died that day I got us stuck. We were helpless. They had plenty of walls to hide behind if they had wanted to shoot at us. Instead they helped us.

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From trentreedy:

This letter includes a description of my room in the barracks.  It also features some good Army engineer stuff and my 34th Infantry Division Red Bull shoulder insignia.  I’m extraordinarily proud to have worn the Red Bull patch, and I know my fellow Red Bulls are as well.  I was thrilled to see the 34th ID Red Bull prominently displayed on the back of the dust jacket of If You’re Reading This.

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From trentreedy:

My unit’s deployment was not extended. However, like Mark Wilson in this video, I learned to let go of anger. I learned that arguing about politics is futile and just another kind of war, and I was very tired of war.

It should also be noted that Sergeant Mark Wilson’s squad leader, Staff Sergeant Joe Pratt, is named in honor of a section leader with whom I served in the Washington Army National Guard.  This section leader was Staff Sergeant Joshua Pratt.  He lost his emotional battle and committed suicide on April 25, 2013. He sent me a Facebook message on March 10, 2013 saying, “Hey, Reedy, you on here?”  I answered the next day, saying I was sorry to have missed his message from the day before. He saw that message April 8, 2013. I’ll never know what he wanted.

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From trentreedy:

This letter has two key elements of real life.  First, like Mark Wilson’s team, my fire team launched every mission with a rousing rendition of the theme from “Rawhide” in the style of the Blues Brothers. I would very often be up in the gun turret with my buddy PFC Weigand driving.  Half my body would be sticking out the top of the Humvee like a cowboy in the saddle. I’d start the song, with the lyrics partially adapted to fit the desert and the war, and when I got to the part where it goes, “Head ‘em up!” the guys would respond accordingly, “Move ‘em out!”  Then I’d say “Rawhide!” and so on.

The other part of real life in this letter is the bombing of the U.N. compound. When the first bomb went off, we didn’t think anything of it. Maybe some Afghan guy had been smoking around a gas can or something. Who knew? But the second explosion was much more powerful. Oh golly, I can still hear that sound, still see that white flash. Unlike Mark Wilson in the book, I did not go to the U.N. compound to help that night. My team stayed on stand-by until late, waiting to triage casualties. Later, I saw a twisted-up vehicle that had exploded there.  It reminded me of what could happen to my guys and me at any time.

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