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Smithson, Ryan. Juvenile literature.
Smithson, Ryan.
Iraq War, 2003-. Personal narratives, American. Juvenile literature.
Soldiers. United States. Biography. Juvenile literature.
Iraq War, 2003-. Personal narratives, American.
Soldiers.
Gr 9 Up-Smithson experienced the events of 9/11 while in high school and responded by enlisting in the Army Reserve after graduation. He married his high school sweetheart before being deployed to Iraq. Once there, he worked as an equipment operator in an equipment platoon, and while mortar fire was a regular occurrence, the missions he describes were all about bulldozing berms, filling craters created by IEDs, and convoying lumber. One gruesome section describes salvaging parts from Humvees in which soldiers died. A few missions, though, were more in the line of favors to the local population than anything that helps combatants. Some of the author's most poignant passages are his descriptions of interactions with Iraqi children. Where he was expecting rock-throwing, he encountered barefoot, dirty children grateful for the water the soldiers gave them. It is these children and the villagers he met that help explain for him the purpose of the war. The book ends with Smithson's return home, his almost magical escape from night terrors, and his work with children in his own hometown. Writing proves to be his therapy for PTSD. There are mixed metaphors aplenty, crude and morbid humor, and other evidence of a young author, but it all works together to create a tough but powerful look at one man's experience. Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids, WI
ALA Booklist (Wed Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2009)In this eloquent nonfiction bildungsroman, a self-described "GI Joe Schmo" hangs meditations about his own feelings, responses, and opinions about the Iraq War on an episodic account of basic training and a 2005 tour of duty. Despite occasional misfires ("the vile, churning stomach of Iraq"), his prose is strong and memorable, well endowed with lines like "The Twin Towers didn't fall in Manhattan. They fell on me," and, describing how closely platoons bond, "It's like being on a wrestling team, only you're more pissed off and carrying munitions." His pride at being one who "ran toward the danger when so many of my generation ran away" comes through clearly, but in looking back he finds reasons for volunteering that go deeper than blind patriotism. Smithson opens with memories of watching the 9/11 attacks on TV, closes with his brief but intense post-tour struggle with night terrors, and in between provides teens with plenty of food for thought about the nature and meaning of military service. Includes a small section of Smithson's black-and-white photos.
Horn BookI am just a GI. Nothing special. A kid doing my job. A veritable Joe Schmo of the masses, of my generation.
Kirkus ReviewsRyan Smithson was a typical 16-year-old high-school student until 9/11. "I'd thought about joining the military the moment I saw the towers fall," he writes in this profoundly moving memoir. Smithson enlisted in the Army Reserve the following year and, a year into the Iraq war, was deployed to an Army engineer unit as a heavy-equipment operator. His poignant, often harrowing account, especially vivid in sensory details, chronicles his experiences in basic training and in Iraq. "Only after we have been completely destroyed can we begin to find ourselves," Smithson writes of basic training, offering an unflinchingly honest portrait of the physical and psychological brutality of that experience. His account of his tour of duty in Iraq is no less compelling. He lucidly recounts the intensity of battle and the pain of losing comrades. For Smithson, the war is a source of personal enlightenment, and this memoir is a remarkable, deeply penetrating read that will compel teens to reflect on their own thoughts about duty, patriotism and sacrifice. (Memoir. YA)
Voice of Youth AdvocatesRyan Smithson was sixteen when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001. He remembers being a self-absorbed teenager at the time, one who could not quite put into words his decision to join the Army Reserve. Ryan's deployment to Iraq two years later shredded his innocence, shaped his life, and is told here in this brutal autobiography. From boot camp to Iraq and back to life in the United States, this autobiography reads like the work of therapy that Smithson claims it as, overflowing with pain and confusion, populated with imagery that teeters on the edge of being brutally obscene. The power of SmithsonÆs experience cannot be denied, and he strives to convey to his readers the lessons he learned while serving in the Army: that death ultimately defines life, that freedom cannot be appreciated before it is lost, and that chaotic evil is the necessary foil to all the positive aspects of humanity. Readers will close this book shaken and potentially nauseated by the casual portrayal of wartime violence, but they also will have an idea of what it is like to be a young veteran. Teens who enjoy stories of war will devour SmithsonÆs text, but it is not a book for everyone. It is all too easy to miss SmithsonÆs point and to see this book as simply an autobiography of pain, gore, and personal trauma.ùJennifer McConnel.
School Library Journal Starred Review (Mon Feb 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)
ALA Booklist (Wed Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2009)
Horn Book
Kirkus Reviews
Voice of Youth Advocates
Wilson's High School Catalog
The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI
Chapter One
Stuck in the Fence
East Greenbush, New York, is a suburb of Albany. Middle-class and about as average as it gets. The work was steady, the incomes were suitable, and the kids at Columbia High School were wannabes. They wanted to be rich. They wanted to be hot. They wanted to be tough. They wanted to be too cool for the kids who wanted to be rich, hot, and tough.
Picture me: the average teenage boy. Blond hair and blue eyes, smaller than average build, and I'll admit, a little dorky. I sat in third-period lunch with friends wearing my brand-new Aéropostale T-shirt and backward hat, wanting to be self-confident. The smells of greasy school lunches filled the air. We were at one of the identical fold-out tables. We were talking, but my thoughts were on my girlfriend, Heather. She was a senior this year and would finally be done. I was a junior and had two more years to go. What a drag.
I had turned sixteen less than a month ago, and so far being sixteen was boring as hell. I remembered watching shows like Saved by the Bell and Welcome Freshmen when I was a kid. How amazingly cool high school had seemed in those shows.
I remembered coming to the high school in fifth grade for a district-wide band concert. I marveled at these independent creatures who had their own cars and girlfriends and after-school jobs and holes in their jeans. They were free in the truest sense of the word.
And then, overnight it seemed, I was sitting in Columbia doing all the "independent" and "wild" things that teenagers did. What a joke. High school was so typical and predictable. Everyone here was so occupied with discovering the definition of cool.
To some, cool was Abercrombie and popped collars. Some thought cool was playing sports. Some thought cool was drinking before the homecoming dance. And others swore that cool was not trying to be cool: nonconformists with black nail polish, leather boots, and oversized safety pins in their ears.
Our free expression was in so many ways just a restriction of our identities. All of us trying to be something we weren't. Even the nonconformists were conforming.
High school, I guessed, was just a chapter, something standing in the way of real freedom. High school didn't even seem real. It seemed so fake.
A friend of mine came into the cafeteria and sat down next to me.
"You hear?" he asked us.
"What?"
"A plane crashed into the World Trade Center."
"That sucks," I said.
The conversation picked back up and we talked about sex or drugs or something equally as interesting. It wasn't that we didn't care about the Trade Center. We shook it off as an accident. We assumed some drunk or stupid pilot had misjudged, clipped a wing, or something, and we shook it off. Shit happens.
The bell rang and the hallways exploded with raucous, horny teenagers. I visited Heather in the hallway, walked her to her class, and went to fourth period, Trigonometry. My math teacher, being pretty obsessive-compulsive, said that we weren't going to watch CNN all period. We were going to learn trig. She mentioned something about the crash but quickly moved on to the isosceles triangle. None of us realized the magnitude of it all yet. Otherwise we would have watched CNN all period.
It wasn't until fifth period, American History, that I understood what happened. During math class, the second plane had crashed, and I walked into History to see a TV showing the now infamous news footage: two enormous twin towers that smoked from their tops, one plume a bit higher than the other.
I walked to my seat and sat down, eyes never leaving the television. I took off my hat, but I didn't open my notebook. I didn't take out my pencil or assume the slumped note-taking position. I knew we weren't going to be taking notes in American History class that day.
The class was abnormally silent. It was high school, and things were usually done in a loud, disrespectful manner. Our teacher, Mr. Barret, motioned to the television and said something I'll never forget.
"You guys are living history."
I never thought of myself as living history before 9/11. History was something that had already happened, something I studied in school. It came out of a textbook. It was hearsay, not real enough to count.
My mind tried to tell me I was watching a movie. It was on TV, after all, and everyone knows you can't believe everything you see on TV. We watched in horror as the first tower collapsed into itself like it was being demolished. This was real, terrifyingly real. The sort of real that makes you lose hope. The atypical, unpredictable kind of real that you never see coming.
That night I called Heather and we talked for a long time about how shocking the attacks were.
"This is probably how people felt after Pearl Harbor," said Heather.
"Probably," I said. "Makes you realize some things."
"Like how crazy the world can be," she said. "It's scary. This is going to cause a war."
"I know."
The next day at school Heather told me she'd had a dream we were attacked. Right in Albany, she said. You could see the city exploding from Denny's, where we worked. Since then, once in a while, she had these dreams. They were always different scenarios related to terrorism, but we were always together .
"They feel like the world is ending," she said about the dreams.
But, contrary to her dreams, life went on. Wrestling season started and was filled with all the hard work, sweat, and pain of my first two seasons.
On nights and weekends I continued working at Denny's as a dishwasher. And Heather worked as a server.
Ghosts of WarThe True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI. Copyright © by Ryan Smithson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI by Ryan Smithson
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
In this extraordinary and harrowing memoir, follow one GI’s tour of duty as Ryan Smithson brings readers inside a world that few understand.
This is no ordinary teenager’s story. Instead of opting for college life, Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was seventeen. Two years later, he was deployed to Iraq as an Army engineer.
His story—and the stories of thousands of other soldiers—is nothing like what you see on CNN or read about in the New York Times. This unforgettable story about combat, friendship, fear, and a soldier’s commitment to his country peels back the curtain on the realities of war in a story all Americans should read.