First published 2009
Donovan Campbell graduated from Princeton and joined the Marines to serve his country. He received command of Joker One, a forty-man infantry platoon filled with untrained recruits. Campbell had only months to turn these new Marines into a fighting unit. His men included Sergeant Leza, who read Che Guevara, Sergeant Mariano Noriel, a Filipino soldier who became Campbell's closest friend, Lance Corporal William Feldmeir, who suffered from narcolepsy and fell asleep during battles, and a lieutenant called "the Ox," whose aggressive nature created problems. The military assigned Joker One to Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, where Sunni insurgents prepared for war. When fighting erupted with cries of "Jihad" from the minarets, Campbell and his Marines protected civilians and battled insurgents in house-to-house combat. After seven months of daily fighting, nearly half the platoon had been wounded, creating casualty rates higher than any Marine or Army unit since Vietnam. Ramadi never fell to enemy forces.
Genres: military-fiction, action, biography-memoir, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Ramadi, Anbar Province
Period: 21st-century
313 pages · Hardcover · Random House
Content warnings: violence, war