“In 2005, after 12 years of active service in the Marine Corps and with growing reservations about the war, I relinquished command of my rifle company and resigned my commission,” Boudreau writes in Packing Inferno. “It struck me that, in our headlong pursuit to deliver freedom and democracy and to expel an oppressive regime and combat terrorism, we had inadvertently lost sight of the very people we’d been deployed to help.”
Packing Inferno is one of the most important historical documents to come out of the Iraq war if for no other reason than it shows what the true face of the Iraq war looks like. It’s a remarkable achievement in war reportage and it deserves to be shelved next to the Great War Books and should be required reading for every lawmaker and students of American history.
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