cover image Last Journey: A Father and Son in Wartime

Last Journey: A Father and Son in Wartime

Darrell Griffin. Atlas, $25 (304pp) ISBN 978-1-934633-16-8

The conflicted, ultimately tragic experience of an American soldier in Iraq is explored in this moving homage. U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Skip Griffin saw heavy fighting during several tours in Iraq before he was killed by a sniper in Baghdad in 2007. His father's memoir portrays Skip as a thoughtful man (he read Plato at age 13) imbued with a skeptical patriotism; despite his deep misgivings about the war, he volunteered to cut short a yearlong break to return to Iraq. Skip's own perceptions emerge through extensive excerpts from his e-mails, blog and other writings. In these he criticized the Bush administration's reasons for the war, deplored the failings of American counterinsurgency strategy and the woeful performance of the Iraqi armed forces, and evinced a growing weariness, edging toward despondency, at the carnage around him. Darrell Sr. overquotes his son's grandiose and not always cogent ideas about religion, philosophy and politics. But when the book sticks to Skip's everyday impressions of the conflict, it presents a harrowing, unsanitized vision of the war and the toll it takes on our soldiers. Photos. (June 29)