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If Walker, a pseudonym, told us his real name, he'd be endangering his family in Iraq. He lives now in the U.S. but was given the code name Johnny Walker by the SEALs when he was working in Iraq with the Americans as an interpreter. How did an Iraqi family man wind up accompanying the American SEALs on multiple missions, many of which resulted in the deaths of Iraqi citizens? It's not a complicated question: the author is a man who loves his country but hated what was being done to it by Saddam Hussein. When the American soldiers came, he saw a chance to help bring justice and peace back to his country. This is an excellent memoir, a story about the post-9/11 war in Iraq as told by someone who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider (he's not a military man). Coauthor DeFelice is a veteran military-fiction and -nonfiction writer, and it's easy to suspect that he provided much of the book's structure and narrative description. But the voice earnest, disillusioned, passionate, patriotic seems undeniably to be that of the pseudonymous Johnny Walker. --Pitt, David Copyright 2014 Booklist