War Flower: My Life after Iraq

by Brooke King

Overview

Brooke King has been asked over and over what it’s like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. In her riveting memoir War Flower, King breaks her silence and reveals the truth about her experience as a soldier in Iraq. Find out what happens when the sex turns into secret affairs, when the violence ramps up to eleven, and how King’s feelings for a country she knew nothing about as a nineteen-year-old become more disturbing to her as a thirty-year-old mother writing it all down before her memories fade into oblivion.

The story of a girl who went to war and returned home a woman, War Flower gathers the enduring remembrances of a soldier coming to grips with post-traumatic stress disorder. As King recalls her time in Iraq, she reflects on what violence does to a woman and how the psychic wounds of combat are unwittingly passed down from mother to children. War Flower is ultimately a profound meditation on what it means to have been a woman in a war zone and an unsettling exposé on war and its lingering aftershocks. For veterans such as King, the toughest lesson of service is that in the mind, some wars never end—even after you come home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640125452
Publisher:	Potomac Books
Publication date:	10/01/2022
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Brooke King is an adjunct professor of English and creative writing at Saint Leo University. She served in the United States Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006 as a wheel-vehicle mechanic. Her nonfiction work has appeared in numerous publications, including Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present (Potomac Books, 2014) and It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (Potomac Books, 2017).

Table of Contents

Prologue: Confessions
Part 1. War Is a Machine
Part 2. Born for the Kill
Part 3. Somewhere in a Desert
Part 4. Frag Out
Part 5. SNAFU
Part 6. In shaa Allah
Part 7. Homeland
Epilogue: Present Arms
Source Acknowledgments
    

Editorial Reviews

"An absolutely compelling war memoir marked by the author's incredible strength of character and vulnerability."—Kirkus, starred review

From the Publisher

01/31/2019

In a searing and moving memoir, King recounts her service in Iraq, her life after Iraq, and the war’s lasting effects on her. Deploying in 2006 as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic in the U.S. Army, the 19-year-old King’s duties included recovering vehicles hit by explosives and “bagging and tagging” the mangled corpses of those who died in them. She recounts the way the U.S. Armed Forces interacted with Iraqis: “We carried out our missions the way we saw fit... raiding houses, trashing rooms, desecrating prayer rugs and kicking over shrines of Muhammad.” The soldiers treated all Iraqis, including children, as potential terrorists, she writes. Once home and pregnant with twins, King suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which she tried to hide from her family. Interwoven are flashbacks to her childhood, her abusive and short-lived first marriage, her wartime affair with the father of her twin boys, and the ways the war has affected her relationship with her sons (they learned early not to play with the knives she carried in her purse). As she reflects on the many ways she brought the war home with her, King reveals the unique burdens borne by female veterans as they reintegrate into a society that seems oblivious to all they’ve been through. This is a harrowing and powerful book. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

“In her memoir about a combat deployment to Iraq, army veteran Brooke King writes, ‘Nothing good survives war.’ I would beg to differ: King went to war, lived through months of unthinkable horrors, and returned with a very good book in her duffel bag. War Flower will leave no reader unmoved, no soul unscathed.”—David Abrams, author of Brave Deeds and Fobbit

David Abrams

"Love, regret, sex, death, mistakes, forgiveness–it’s real in the military and everywhere, and nothing is easy, but people contain a million things, and the beauty of writing is that the author decides what to keep, and what to let get away."—Military Spouse Book Review

Military Spouse Book Review

“Searing with unapologetic candor and grit—even during its surprising, fragmented moments of breathtaking, heartbreaking poeticism—Brooke King’s War Flower sweeps aside all veils of illusion regarding the impact of trauma and moral injury on the human psyche, while also illuminating the disturbing cross-generational consequences of war. For those who have asked for years: Where are the combat memoirs from women veterans? brace for impact.”—Tracy Crow, coeditor of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan

Tracy Crow

"War Flower provides a different, but necessary perspective on modern war, and on war as a female soldier."—Jade Anna Hughes, From the Inside

From the Inside - Jade Anna Hughes

“Raw and unvarnished, as it must be, combat veteran Brooke King’s memoir War Flower is a searing and unforgettable journey through death and dying, both at war and on the home front—as a child and as a mother, as a soldier and as a civilian. She somehow manages to braid several memoirs into one, offering several lenses into the battlefield of the mind, and the result is a book that has earned its place on the high shelf of American literature. While War Flower is set to ‘the tuned pitch of human pain,’ this is a book about survival. I’ve waited for this book for many years now, and yet, as I turn the last page, I’m stunned in the reading of it.”—Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country and Here, Bullet

Brian Turner

"War Flower is full of such frank emotion and explicit intimacy, the story of an Iraq veteran whose perspective is alternately chilling and charming."—J. Ford Huffman, Military Times

Military Times - J. Ford Huffman

"This book is an amazing way to get to know how deeply affected people are by war in general, and how hard it is to come back to your normal life after that."—Radioactive Book Reviews

Radioactive Book Reviews