Synopses & Reviews
They say the only good morning in a war zone is the morning you leave. . . .
A boom jolted me from my sleep.
Everything shook. My cot, the ground, the walls. In the dark, I reached for my Kevlar [helmet], which was vibrating under my cot, and grabbed my vest from the hook it was shaking on. Throwing my Kevlar on my head, I started to secure my vest when: boom.
The sound of the second mortar round exploding thundered in my ears. Damn. This one was close. And loud. So damned loud. But strangely I felt as though I were in a silent movie. I couldn’t hear the scratch of the Velcro as I secured my vest. The dull hum penetrated the earth and filled my ears with ringing. Somewhere on Anaconda, field artillery folks were scrambling to determine the mortars’ point of origin so that we could prepare a counterattack. My body, every nerve ending, was in a state of high alert, primed for action.
Synopsis
Several people are waiting to greet Captain Vivian Gembara when she returns home after a year-long tour of duty in Iraq--her grateful fiancŠ and two officers dispatched from headquarters to retrieve "the file." Certainly not the homecoming she expected, but such is life when you are in the business of soldiers behaving badly.
As a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Vivian counsels them, investigates them, and when necessary, prosecutes them. When an Iraqi teenagers body is found floating in the Tigris River and U.S. soldiers are believed to have been involved, she knows she has a case on her hands. What she doesn't realize is just how much that case will reveal about the Armys conduct at war.
Drowning in the Desert: A JAG's Search for Justice in Iraq is both a legal thriller and a searing account of the savagery that occurs when commanders place "the fight" above all else.
Synopsis
The remarkable first-person account of the search for justice of a young army lawyer in Iraq.
About the Author
Vivian Gembara attended the University of Notre Dame on an Army ROTC scholarship and received her law degree from the College of William and Mary. She is now out of the army and lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband and two corgis.