DOONESBURY'S THE SANDBOX

For this post, I graciously copied and pasted the words of the book's editor, David Stanford. I cannot say it better than he has:

"We are pleased to mark the first anniversary of this site by announcing the imminent publication of Doonesbury.com's THE SANDBOX: Dispatches From Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan  (Andrews McMeel, $16.95, 6x9, 336pp, trade paperback original). Featuring over 90 posts by almost 40 writers (ten of whom are shown on the cover and flaps), the book is a fundraiser for Fisher House, a "home away from home" for the families of patients receiving medical care at major military and VA medical centers. You can order a copy here.

By way of introduction, I'll quote the flap copy:

Launched as a military blog (or "milblog") by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau in October 2006, The Sandbox offers serice members deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq a way to tell their stories to readers here at home. In hundreds of fascinating and compelling posts, soldiers write passionately, eloquently, and movingly of their day-to-day lives, of their mission, and of the drama that unfolds daily around them.

Some posts are eminently practical for the troops themselves -- like Troy Steward's "List of Gear for Sandbox Deployment," and Stefan Ralph's "Two Very Different Conflicts," an annotated list of books he read before his deployment. Others are reflective, like Lee Kelley's piece on Christmas in a war zone, and Gordon "Teflon Don" Alanko's contemplation of ancient dust. Roy Batty's evocative posts from various assignments in Iraq have sometimes come in with the immediacy of a news flash, and are eagerly anticipated on the site; the same for Doug Traversa's series of thoughtful conversations with his translator Hamid. (Traversa got all three of his roommates to contribute to The Sandbox, making them the first fully posted hut in the AO). The gripping accounts of Adam Tiffen form another throughline, as do the posts of Anthony McCloskey (a.k.a. "Tadpole"), a sailor serving with the Army in Afghanistan.

This rich outpouring of stories, from the hilarious to the thrilling to the heartbreaking, helps us understand what so many of our countrymen are going through and the sacrifices they are making on our behalf.

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