Why ‘Walk In My Combat Boots’?

Review by Bill Doughty

“These are the stories America needs to hear about the remarkable young men and women who serve.” –– Adm. William H. McRaven, US Navy (Ret.)

“Walk in My Combat Boots” by James Patterson, Matt Eversmann, and with Chris Mooney (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) focuses on military service members from each key service. Each warfighter tells their individual stories –– often about how and why they joined, what combat is like, and how war impacts the people who deploy. Most of the combat scenes are in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of the stories ask, sometimes in screaming prose: Why? Collectively, these recollections give the reader a better appreciation of the service and sacrifice of these young men and women.

The authors present the stories in crisp first-person voice and in honest brutal detail –– what Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, US Army (Ret.), calls “painfully raw, improbably funny, and completely human.” The individual stories are short, the language is conversational, and the font-type is large, but the content is sometimes hard to read; the authors pull no punches. This book is not for kids.

President George W. Bush presents the Purple Heart medal to US Army PFC Jeddah DeLoria of Chosen, Colo., Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007 at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. DeLoria was recovering from injuries sustained in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. (Joyce N. Boghosian)

Some of the most interesting stories include those by Miguel Ferrer, a Navy corpsman who had challenges working with the Afghan military; Jeddah Deloria (pictured above), born in the Philippines, who received a Purple Heart from President George W. Bush; Navy Chief Petty Officer Ryan Leahy, whose great grandfather was one of naval history’s most influential leaders, Adm. William Leahy; Staff Sgt. Lisa Marie Bodenburg (pictured below), a Marine door gunner, who says, “I would do it all over again in a heartbeat, because I love the Marine Corps. I love leading Marines. There is nothing greater, no greater feeling, no greater responsibility or achievement.”

Then-Cpl. Lisa M. Bodenburg, a UH-1N crew chief with Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 367, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (LCpl. Frederick J. Coleman)

The service members, like Army intelligence collector “Red,” whose father served in the Navy, describes what it was like every day in Iraq. For example:

“When you’re in Iraq, you don’t have any days off. If you’re here for a year, it’s 365 days, every day. You never get a break, and it takes years off your life. Big years. There’s the physical demand –– always being on patrol or being stuck doing time-sensitive target (TST) missions and not sleeping for forty-eight hours –– and then there’s the mental aspect of seeing all the shit you see, doing the shit you do. Sometimes you do things that don’t feel right. You question your own morality. It’s mentally and emotionally and spiritually draining.

Every. Single. Day.”

Election Day in Baghdad, Iraq, 2010. (Spc. Edward Siguenza)

Dozens of stories ask "why?" –– why did I join, why did I step on an IED, why did I have to face life-or-death decisions, why can’t I go back to be with my troops, and why can’t the locals reject the violence in their culture?

Patrick Kern attended West Point and joined the Army. His brother chose the Marines. Patrick expresses the frustration of serving in Iraq, where the local population was not just generally thankless for attempts to ensure fair elections but also often dangerous to the service members trying to help them.

“When the Iraqis are not attacking us, they’re attacking the elections that are going on. A chief of police from one tribe gets elected, and the other tribe assassinates him. We have another election. Another guy wins, and then he gets assassinated. The Sunnis go after any Shiites who go out and vote. Suicide car bombs go off and kill anywhere from seventy to eighty people.

It’s a daily occurrence.

When they’re not killing each other, they’re mortaring our forward operating base and using IEDs to try to take us out on the roads…

… What people have a hard time understanding is the Iraqi culture isn’t wired for democracy … Their culture values death.”

Jason Burke

Jason Burke, who retired as a Navy captain, laments the corruption he confronted in counterinsurgency missions in Afghanistan against the Taliban. “Trying to reduce corruption –– it’s a difficult and, at times, impossible task.” He describes Afghanistan in 2008 as "like the Wild West."

"The level of poverty here –– people can't imagine it. In some of these area, you see groups of kids running around without shoes in forty-degree weather, dirty from head to toe, hair in dreadlocks, snot in their noses. But as a whole, they smiled and played like children anywhere else on the planet. They had hope."

Burke tells with teeth-clenching tension about his role in the capture of Aafia Siddiqui, “Lady al Qaeda,” a Pakistani terrorist who studied in the United States at the University of Houston, MIT, and Brandeis, before returning to the region to try to kill Americans in Afghanistan.

Ron Silverman, an Army MEDCOM major general, performed dental work on Saddam Hussein. He shares some of Hussein’s last thoughts before the former Iraqi leader was put to death by hanging. And, he speaks about being back home in the United States and taking long walks on the beach, even in the middle of the night.

“Tonight, as I’m walking along the beach, the sky is beautiful and clear, the moon glistening over the calm, still waters. It’s serene. I think about how, for over a year, I couldn’t go anywhere alone –– I certainly couldn’t walk anywhere by myself at night.

And here I am outside, walking along this beach in freedom, and it brings tears to my eyes. Most people don’t recognize or understand what we have here, in the United States.”

Providing security during an assault on an air assault near Tikrit, Iraq, 2008. (Rick Rzepka)

That’s the reason why this book is a must-read. It’s why we cherish freedom and those who fight to preserve freedom and defend elections.

Consider the idiomatic adage, “unable to see the forest for the trees.” This book is an up-close examination of the individual “trees,” with less consideration of the forest –– and the concept of how it grew there. But war is more than a concept, and these necessary stories show the realities and effects of combat up close and personal.

President Bill Clinton writes, “This book will take your breath away, break your heart, and leave you in awe of the hard work, raw courage, ingenuity, and resilience of the men and women who wear the boots. You’ll hear them say why they do it and how they deal with triumph, tragedy, and living with the legacy of their service. Every American should read it.”

(This is part one of a two-part review of this remarkable book for Navy Reads, with the second to be published in time for Memorial Day.)