Cpl. Jason Dunham, a Marine from a small town in upstate New York, was on patrol with some buddies in Iraq when an Iraqi grabbed him and threw a grenade. Dunham instantly dropped his helmet on the grenade as it exploded, killing him and wounding his companions. For this he has been nominated to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first in the Iraqi campaign to have been so honored. His story was told in a recent pair of widely read articles in the Wall Street Journal by reporter
Michael Phillips, and a book,
The Gift of Valor, that will be a much-expanded version of the stories, has just been preempted by
Charles Conrad at Broadway, world English rights, for publication next spring. The deal was made with agent
Marly Rusoff, whose novelist client Arthur Phillips (Prague; The Egyptologist) is Michael's brother.
