What They Signed Up For

They grew up on wheat farms in Eastern Washington, on a reservation in Oklahoma, in military housing on an Air Force base in Arizona. They signed up to be Marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors, and they became medics, truck drivers, mechanics, and infantrymen. They enlisted to honor family tradition, to find purpose in their lives, to lift themselves out of poverty, to be patriots. And they went to war.

In What They Signed Up For, edited by Jeb Wyman and published by Blue Ear Books, 18 American veterans tell their stories of going to war and life after they came home. In the cities of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, they witnessed the carnage of suicide bombs and survived daily mortar attacks. They put friends into body bags and saw others grievously wounded. They saw the effects of American firepower on civilians. They lived through the hellishness of war.