U.S. forces commandeered Saddam Hussein's notorious prison at Abu Ghraib in order to house thousands of detainees after the March 2003 invasion. Later that year, reports of prisoner torture and abuse by American soldiers with accompanying pictures and videos became world news. At this nadir of American pride, the 152nd Maine Army National Guard Field Artillery Battalion was finishing mountain conflict training at Fort Dix with orders for deployment to Afghanistan. Among them was William "Dizl" Thorndike, middle-aged father of four with a background in clam digging, teaching, EMT dispatching and prison guarding. A week before deployment, the 152nd was abruptly redirected to Abu Ghraib with no relevant training and little basic desert battle gear. Their job: bring order out of chaos, and unofficially, "do not make us look bad."
Veteran Marine combat correspondent W. Zach Griffith's Packed for the Wrong Trip is the story of how Dizl and his comrades overcame their lack of training with raw guts and a Maine talent for fixing anything with "duct tape and string" in order to tame the monster hellhole Abu Ghraib--"a garbage-strewn complex of grayish-brown buildings... surrounded by a twenty-five-foot-high grayish-brown concrete perimeter wall." Bedeviled by regular mortar and rocket attacks, prisoner uprisings, sniper fire and explosives along the supply road to Baghdad, Dizl and the 152nd managed in one year to upgrade conditions for prisoners, expedite release of the innocent, and partially redeem the U.S.'s tarnished reputation. Griffith has a storyteller's knack for action and successfully weaves anecdotes, interviews, history and the frightening ambience of men at war into a chronicle of heroism and redemption. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.