Determined to ensure that he would never be short of a book to read on his Iraqi tour of duty, he selected around 70 books - from Wodehouse to Hemingway to Dickens to Atwood – and sent to them to Iraq by boat via Kuwait....
"It seems silly to say this, but I worry about those three footlockers of books and their perilous journey along the Iraqi highway of death. In my nightmare thoughts, I imagine a rocket-propelled grenade tearing into the side of the connex (military shipping container) and igniting all my pages. I know it's stupid to worry about things like this when soldiers are getting shot and blown up. But these are the frets of a die-hard bibliophile in a combat zone."
—David Abrams [Sgt. First Class USMC] in Reading in Iraq: One Soldier's Devotion to Books
You can read an excerpt of Abrams' writing at the Emerging Writers Network.
