In 2005, I applied to be Bob’s research assistant on his next writing project, and as part of the interview process, he asked me to critique Plan of Attack, his book about President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. There’s a scene in that book in which Bush announces a new foreign policy doctrine—one that ultimately put the country on the path to war in Iraq.
I was struck by the fact that Bush gave the speech at the West Point commencement in June 2002. If Bob hired me, I wrote in the footnote, he should ask me to locate a few members of the West Point class who graduated that day and find out how their lives were affected by Bush’s new doctrine.
I got the job, and my first assignment was to follow up on the footnote. I tracked down several dozen members of the class of 2002 and started interviewing them. But then Bob’s new book, State of Denial, went in a different direction, and I thought that was the end of it. Wrong: word of my research had spread, and now the class of 2002 was contacting me. And when your phone rings, and it’s a soldier who’s never told anyone about what he saw in Iraq, you listen.
After I finished my work on State of Denial, I went to Iraq, embedded with the military, and shadowed some of the young officers from the class. And I continued to listen (and laugh and cry) as they talked about their spouses and their families, about the births of their children and the deaths of their brothers in arms, about the horrors of war and the beauty they found in small acts of kindness.
My hope is that if you read In a Time of War, you’ll feel that you’ve come to know a few good men and women—fellow citizens whose lives have been utterly defined by the two wars our nation has waged for nearly 10 years.
And I hope you’ll feel, as I do, that we should honor these proud soldiers who have sacrificed so much to serve our country in a time of war.
Bill Murphy Jr. is the author of In a Time of War: the Proud & Perilous Journey of West Point’s Class of 2002 (and of course, The Intelligent Entrepreneur). A lawyer and former Army Reserve officer, he reported from Iraq for The Washington Post in 2007. He lives in Washington, D.C.
