The Last True Story Ill Ever Tell An Accidental Soldiers Account of the War in Iraq

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition. One weekend a month. Two weeks a year. A free education. But in 2002, one semester shy of graduation and on his honeymoon, Crawford was shipped off to the front lines in Iraq. Once there he was determined to get it all down, to chronicle the daily life of a soldier in all its brutal, terrifying, heartbreaking honesty. The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell introduces a powerful new literary voice forged in the most intense of circumstances.

User Ratings and Reviews

1 Star I THREW IT IN THE TRASH
I am very grateful to all the men and women who have fought our nation’s wars. However, I hated this book and threw it disgustedly into the trash. I have read hundreds of books, but I have only destroyed three: this one, one by demented “comedian” Lewis Black, and a book by that creepy bounty hunter Duane Chapman.

I understand that soldiers use profanity, especially those in combat. I was in the U.S. Army in the Vietnam era. Excessive and incessant profanity in print is tedious at best and, in fact, repugnant.

Crawford tries to use clever literary devices but they just don’t work. His gear changes are abrupt and grinding, leaving the reader puzzled and confused. Frankly, I could not tell when the author was trying to tell the truth. I found the book extremely disturbing. Perhaps that was Crawford’s objective.

4 Stars 18 (True) Stories from the Iraq War
For the most part, I’ve been avoiding the deluge of books coming out of the Iraq War. I’ve had family serve there, and it’s one part of modern history that’s simply too depressing for me to dig into. Nonetheless, this personal account looked more appealing than most, and its bite-sized vignettes seemed more likely to contain truth than some of the massive tomes seeking to make particular points.

It’s important to acknowledge right from the start that the book is burdened the unwise use of “an accidental soldier” in the book’s subtitle. The general consensus is that if you sign up to take the National Guard money for school, you can’t complain if you get called into action. Some reviewers seem to find Crawford’s take on his unit’s call-up overly whiny, however it seemed to me that his main gripe was with his unit’s continued indefinite deployment following multiple assurances of being sent home. His unit was repeatedly attached to “regular” Army units that got rotated back home, while he and his fellow Guardsmen stayed. Whatever one’s position on this, throughout history it has been the privilege and solace of soldiers everywhere to gripe about their lot — and this memoir is firmly part of that tradition.

The eighteen pieces are all more or less all vignettes linked only by Crawford’s presence and desire to be elsewhere. They run the gamut: the boredom of guarding a gas station and bouncing line-jumpers, dealing with corpses cut in half by .50 caliber rounds, botched ambushes, the lure of morphine, spending Christmas at a traffic control point, a beer heist, the consequences of befriending a local homeless kid and flirting with a local girl, broken or inadequate equipment, serving under bad officers, and so on. On the plus side, Crawford writes with apparent candor and conviction. On the minus side, his generally plain-spoken naturalistic prose sometimes drifts into pretension and cliche. Also, some of his episodes have a familiar feel to them, which is probably a function of the basic similarity of war throughout time.

Several reviewers seem to have misread a paragraph in the final part of the book, interpreting it as some kind of statement that the memoir is a work of fiction. What the passage actually says is that the initial item he wrote for the book (and which does not appear in it) was a work of fiction — not that the pieces included in the book are fiction. For confirmation, check out the review posted by a soldier from his unit, affirming the veracity of Crawford’s stories. And to a certain extent, it doesn’t even matter — he was there, I wasn’t, and his writing made the war quite real and alive, in all it’s banal and surreal ingloriousness.

1 Star One of the Worst Books I’ve had the Misfortune to Read
I was forced to read this book for two of my college classes this year, and this is by far the most repugnant and pointless reading assignment I’ve ever had to endure. Perhaps Crawford accurately described the conditions of war; I’m not a soldier and I don’t know much about it, so I can’t argue with that. It may be a very informative book in that respect. However, if that atrocity passes for literature these days, we are in a world of trouble. The book is very poorly written, with an incoherent story line, and mainly consists of short stories highlighting the narrator’s criminal or simply immoral actions in Iraq, interspersed with copious amounts of profanity. Throughout the entire book, Crawford complains about being sent to Iraq and seems incapable of accepting the consequences of his actions. Rather than claiming that the book is about his experiences in Iraq, Crawford should state that the book is about his constant, implacable gripes and laments. His reprehensible personality and rather childish writing style are bad enough to ruin the book, but the page after page of disgusting swearwords and obscenities are the maggots on the corpse. Towards the end of the novel, Crawford promises that “this is the last true story I’ll ever tell.” Would to God he had spared himself the endeavor!

3 Stars True or not, a depressing read
Well, 140+ reviews are already in, but I’ll throw my two cents in. Let me preface this by saying I’m not a soldier and never will be, don’t support the Iraq war, but would support a well-managed war on terrorists who actually threaten our safety. I suppose that makes me reasonably unbiased. i started this book not knowing a thing about its contents or the attitudes of the author.

It’s a collection of possibly quasi-fictive vignettes and memories of the author’s tour patrolling the streets of Baghdad for over a year. Crawford is an extremely bitter man, and I was struck by how entitled and selfish he paints himself, how little empathy he shows. Even the subtitle, “an accidental soldier,” is misleading: he wasn’t drafted, he signed up for the National Guard. If he didn’t think that made him a soldier, then I pity his ignorance.

But much worse, throughout the book, his behavior and attitudes are shocking. He knows and cares nothing for the culture, history or people of Iraq: this from an anthropology major (one who was, he informs the reader several times, “just two credits away from graduation,” as if that makes a difference). His stories are straight out of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket: these are not patriotic soldiers, or even the devil-may-care kids out for violence and glory depicted in Generation Kill. They’re drug-taking, food-stealing, rule-breaking, apathetic clowns.

Crawford’s stories condemn him again and again: he steals food from Iraqi refugee packets; he steals an Iraqi’s motorbike; he flirts with Iraqi women, getting one possibly thrown into the street as a whore; he befriends but does not protect a loyal Iraqi shopkeeper; he watches with glee a small boy about to be beaten by a gang. In short, he depicts himself as a terrible person, which makes his stories of incompetence, clueless superiors, and failure throughout the Army, even if true, less moving.

My dislike of the man doesn’t color the literary side of the review, however, and Crawford gets three stars for several powerful stories, and a stirring, provocative argument that certainly makes you think.

5 Stars This Won’t Hurt A Bit….It Will Hurt A Lot.
This is the book I hoped JARHEAD would be, but wasn’t: a tough, terse, horror-packed memior from a man with no chip on his shoulder, just as desire to unload the truckload of baggage he’s been carrying around ever since he returned from Iraq. And my, does he unload. This is a short book, the type you can read in a couple of days, but it doesn’t spare the reader for a second. If there was any fat on THE LAST TRUE STORY, it’s sawdust somewhere on the editing-room floor.

John Crawford was like hundreds of thousands of other Americans back in 2003 - a regular guy who happened to have an obligation to the United States military. In this case, the Florida National Guard. In fact, he was a newlywed, just two credits short of graduating from college, when the call came to gear up and head to Saddam Hussein’s penitentiary state on a task of “democracy building” or “finding weapons of mass destruction” or whatever the hell the reason was at the time.

Crawford, I hasten to add, was “just” a National Guardsman. Not a Special Forces guy, Ranger, Marine - not even a regular Army infantryman. And yet he repeatedly points out that his unit more than held its own in the field and gave nothing away to any of the above, despite conditions which were appalling even by wartime standards. (I hasten to add here that it was the 29th Infantry which was in the first wave at D-Day…and it was a National Guard outfit). First, his unit was equpped not merely with “soft” (unarmored) Humvees, they were carrying flak vests and M-16s which were of Vietnam vintage and had so few spare parts that their night vision gear was paperweight material after a few weeks in-country. Second, Crawford felt as if most of the NG officers were skulking careerists who didn’t give a damn about their men and were interested mainly in earning points towards promotion. Third, his outfit was not deployed in its own right but stuck like a band-aid and “attached” (subordinated) to other units, who naturally used it to absorb the punishment they themselves were taking. The orphans of the Army, the men of Crawford’s outfit quickly learned that if they wanted to survive, they were going to have to take care of themselves.

Crawford takes a certain pleasure in shoving the reader, face-first, through the superheated, gasoline-drenched, feces-crusted streets of Baghdad, where every rooftop can contain a sniper and every yard of road a bomb. Where every CNN reporter is trying his hardest to get the ordinary soldier court-martialed and most of the officers care more about paperwork than the lives of their men. Where nearly everyone you see wants you dead and even the people you depend on the most can be your worst enemies. And where every minute of the tension-filled, boredom-suffocated, sweat-soaked days and nights you wonder what your wife or sweetheart is doing back home…and who she’s doing it with. Swafford’s book, JARHEAD, was really about the psychological strain that accompanies waiting endlessly in a miserable environment for a fight that never comes; THE LAST TRUE STORY is about the fight itself. About losing close friends, about dealing with the fear of death on an hourly basis, about physical misery - stench, filth, sweat, exhaustion, dehydration, heat, scorpions in your boots, sand in your eyeballs and no relief in sight - not tomorrow, not next month, and maybe never if the next bomb has your name on it. And as for the Why of it - who knows? It’s not your war. You’re just fighting it.

In sum, every American, regardless of political opinion or feelings about the war, regardless of military experience or lack of it, should read this book. Because it’s the closest thing to being there, and we owe it to the hundreds of thousands of John Crawfords in this country to have at least a paper understanding of what they went through.

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