RUTHFULLY YOURS

September 11, 2001. The date has faded from memory for far too many, almost becoming a cliché of sorts, like D-Day becoming just another day in military history. In the nine years that have followed, we have sent our loved ones to war in a far off land – a war with an enemy without a uniform, without any obvious structure. And while the current administration declares the end of fighting in Iraq over, there are no victory celebrations of the war’s end; for you cannot declare victory in war if you have not defeated your enemy. There are still soldiers in combat while at home, a different kind of war rages on in a battle of ideology from a proposed mosque at Ground Zero to possible Koran burnings in Florida and whether or not Muslim women should be able to wear their burkhas to work.

However, September 11 will live in the minds of many as not only the day a small group of terrorists viciously massacred thousands, but it is a day that changed our lives forever as our husbands, sons, wives and daughters prepared for war. Their service to their country was not in vain, as current events may seem to show. Some of us were able to tell our stories to an unbiased media, authors who forever put our words, photos and experiences in book form in a way the sixty second sound bites on the news could not. Realizing the importance of just that mission, to tell the truth of who we were and why we were in the Middle East, my husband, Mark, and I had the golden opportunity to work with author, Col. Gerry Schumacher (US Army – Special Forces – Retired) on his book, ‘A Bloody Business – America’s War Zone Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq’, published in 2006. Just months before that release, a young soldier named Shane Bernskoetter released his diary of his tour in Iraq, ‘Surviving Twilight’. Both books, like a handful of others, shine a light into the ‘hearts and minds’, to coin a well-worn cliché, of our soldiers and civilians who served and continue to serve valiantly in the War on Terror. These are rare stories without political commentary or apologetics to the Islamic enemy we continue to fight. They are the words of the men who lived and died for the mission and it takes the right author to portray such an account accurately and with the emotion and endurance felt by these men and women on the battlefield.

I have had on my desk for some time now another such book, ‘The Only Thing Worth Dying For’ by bestselling author, Eric Blehm, a riveting, day to day account of eleven Green Berets, members of the ODA-574, US Army 5^th Special Forces Group – men whose mission in the early days after September 11 was to slip into Afghanistan and destroy the Taliban from within. An unfathomable task to so many, these men were trained and ready when the call came in the days after the attack on the World Trade Center. It is a rare account into the world of Special Forces and into a group that went to war in which conventional warfare was irrelevant as we fought an unconventional, often hidden, enemy in the unknown hills and caves of Afghanistan. Led by Captain Jason Amerine, this elite group from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, ‘The Only Thing Worth Dying For’ takes us from the safe houses in Afghanistan, where Capt. Amerine and his men work with a leader-in-exile, Hamid Karzai, to stabilize the Afghan government to the bloody attack that ended the war for these eleven men months later. The reader hears the gunshots, feels the emotion of battle of a reality that needs to be told. Blehm is the rare writer that can bring the coldness and ugliness of war to life and leaves the reader with a new understanding of the men and women who fight, and why.

The “news alerts” of our successes in Afghanistan and Iraq have become mere footnotes of the death toll in the nightly news. However, nine years later, a new generation of young adults – those who were only toddlers on the outset of the war – and seemingly an entire nation, have all but forgotten what we are fighting for. It is such books as “The Only Thing Worth Dying For” that cuts through the sound bites and the political and military analysis, that brings to the reader the men and women who felt the pain of death, smelled the gunpower and blood as they fought on valiantly and courageously. Real people like you and me who left the comforts and luxuries we take for granted and dug themselves in the sand to fight.

‘The Only Thing Worth Dying For’ is available at Amazon.com and booksellers nationwide.

1993 should have been a wakeup call, when terrorism hit us here at home, but we hit the snooze button. Nine years ago on 9/11 the alarm sounded louder. Why are we still asleep?