Driving Around, Waiting to Get Blown Up: Hearts, Minds, and the Occupation of Iraq

by Mark L Stoneman

Overview

Driving Around, Waiting to Get Blown Up is a war story for people who don't read war stories.

It candidly describes what the occupation of Iraq was like for one officer tasked with keeping his soldiers alive while also protecting the Iraqi people he was responsible for. It captures the daily routine for many of the American soldiers who served during Operation Iraqi Freedom: driving from village to village, talking to the local people, and waiting for the inevitable boom that signaled one of their Humvees had just been blown up.

This is the story of what happens when America decides to overthrow a government but then finds itself in charge of a country it doesn't understand and a population that views it not as liberators, but occupiers. This is what happens after "mission accomplished."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798886794892
Publisher:	Luminare Press
Publication date:	12/16/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Mark Stoneman was born in London, England, and moved to the US to attend college. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the United States Army, ultimately becoming a US citizen and an officer. He served for twenty years, was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and was also stationed in South Korea and at the Pentagon.

Editorial Reviews

2025-01-10
A memoir of day-to-day life during a U.S Army officer’s 2005 deployment in Iraq.

A well-known quote attributed to Gen. George S. Patton—“Just drive down that road until you get blown up”—gives Stoneman’s war memoir its title, as well as a sense of the grind of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Aiming to fill the gap between memoirs of elite military units and “sundry pieces of criticism, usually written by observers with an axe to grind but no real expertise,” the author chronicles the mundane, sometimes terrifying day-to-day lives of the artillery unit he commanded as they patrolled the rural Diyala Province in 2005. Stoneman’s perspective is both typical and unconventional: As a captain, he was a cog in the United States’ vast military machine; he’s also British-born and moved to America as an adult. This cultural remove, along with the affection he clearly had for the soldiers with whom he served, make him a fine observer of class, racial, political and organizational dynamics. He tells of how his unit had to defend itself and Iraqi citizens from insurgents, but how it also enacted nation-building policies. For example, he chronicles how plans to install a village drinking-water system foundered due to a combination of military bureaucracy and local politics; key tasks, he notes, were farmed out to contractors to save money. Even successful missions sometimes involved terrible violence; after his unit uncovered a cache of land mines, for instance, Stoneman’s unit killed the insurgents responsible from a distant vantage point, and then watched as a pack of wild dogs devoured the insurgents’ remains. Overall, Stoneman’s prose is crisp and lucid, and even his wry depictions of boredom in the field (“We had run out of things to talk about four months ago, but conversation persisted like the heat”) and Army administration shine with humor and real insight.

A war story told with wit and clarity.

Kirkus Reviews