‘Beyond Duty’ gives glimpse of combat choices, aftermath - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

‘Beyond Duty’ gives glimpse of combat choices, aftermath

Capt. Shannon Meehan won’t say whether he supports the war in Iraq or condemns it.

“Either way, I haven’t provided the right answer,” he writes. “Either way, I’ve gone far beyond duty.”

No question about that.

Meehan graduated from the Virginia Military Institute with an English degree and a sense of obligation to his country, and became part of a tank company of 80 soldiers “responsible for an area roughly the size of Long Island.” He tells his story in “Beyond Duty: Life on the Front line in Iraq.”

In a familiar predicament for U.S. service members in Operation Iraqi Freedom, “we were, obviously, stretched thin,” he writes. In early 2007, “we began to feel the side effects of the Baghdad surge.

“Baqubah became increasingly dangerous, and our battalion ... began to see casualties mount.”

Pressure mounted, too. Meehan was in command when a wire trail from an improvised explosive device forced him to decide whether to bomb the source of the wire. “I wasn’t going to let fear of making a bad decision control me.”

Bad or good, his order destroyed the target, but its victims’ deaths haunted him and his soldiers. What had happened became “a void, both in the air between us all and within me, and I did not know how to walk into that void without it collapsing and crushing me.”

But there was little time for introspection. Near the end of another patrol, “exactly two years to the day I had become active duty in the Army,” another IED entered his team’s world. This time, the effect was not just psychological.

Meehan received “a severe concussion, a ruptured ear drum, a wounded arm, a knee injury and severe compression on the discs in my back.” Later, he got a Purple Heart and was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

What the reader gets is a straightforward, succinct and insightful report of one man’s experience at war, written by Meehan with Roger Thompson, a VMI English professor.

The book resonates because Meehan speaks not for sympathy but for understanding, and because — sadly — his personal story is one that other service members know well.

Beyond Duty: Life on the Front Line in Iraq

By Shannon P. Meehan with Roger Thompson

Polity Press, 270 pages, $25.