Book Summary

A young Iraqi shares the true story of his wartime experiences after he was recruited by the US Army as an interpreter.

Fahdi was a twenty-one-year-old, upper-middle class, English-speaking student at Baghdad University when he was recruited right off the street to serve as an interpreter for a US Army unit just days after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Over the next two years, Fahdi would go on to translate for US drill sergeants training new Iraqi Army recruits in Ramadi; serve alongside US Marines during the first Battle of Fallujah; and eventually land a position as a linguist with Iraq’s newly formed national intelligence agency in Baghdad.

Along the way, he suffered combat injuries, faced the challenges of integrating with American soldiers in US camps, was hunted by local insurgency groups for assisting the “infidels”—and eventually fell in love with an American service member. As told to that service member—now his wife and the author of her own memoir, A Foreign Affair—this is a unique firsthand perspective on one of the United States’ most controversial foreign conflicts.