October 4, 2005 - John Crawford was on his honeymoon and in the last semester of an undergraduate work at Florida State when his Florida National Guard Unit was called up in the autumn of 2002. His guard unit crossed the border with the Third Infantry Division. They were told that their tour would likely be two months – three at most and they would be home. John Crawford tells their story with an honesty that makes you fell the heat of the Baghdad summer and taste the grit of an Iraqi sandstorm. Let Crawford tell you about the hook.

“This hook is the story of a group of college students, American boys who wanted nothing to do with someone else’s war. It is out story. The world hears stories told by reporters and generals who keep extensive notebooks and journals. They carry pens as they walk whereas I carried a machine gun…

“I have too many of these stories to tell … maybe some one will know what we did here. It won’t assuage the suffering inside me, inside all of us. It won’t bring back someone’s son or brother or wife. It will simply make people aware, if only for one glimmering moment, of what war is really like.”

Crawford doesn’t preach. You don’t know whether he came home against the war or supporting the invasion policy. You do know when you finish the book that he is filled with the disdain for command that tells you he was a line trooper and not a desk jockey. His stories bring you the horrid taste of a war where everybody out of uniform – and many in uniform as well are the enemy. And he tells us what he knows now that he is home.

“In my dream my wife never told me that things would have been better off if I had never come home. In reality I agree with her.

“This is a true story. You can tell because it makes your stomach turn. I am home now, and I will never again write a true story.”

I won’t sully this book review by including my opinion of the Second Iraqi war. You can’t really compare one mans war to another’s or one author’s descriptions to another’s but Crawford’s stories read like John Hersey’s or Phil Caputo’s in their honest and vivid limning of the lost boundaries of humanity that define war.

Whether your way to support the troops is to bring them home from a failed war or you want to support them by sending them more hajjis to kill, you need to read this book. The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell is published by Riverside Books, New York and the 217 page hard cover edition is $23.00 at Borders. It is a book that you will not forget