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by Amanda Matti (Author)
A young Iraqi shares the true story of his wartime experiences after he was recruited by the US Army as an interpreter.
Fahdi was a twenty-one-year-old, upper-middle class, English-speaking student at Baghdad University when he was recruited right off the street to serve as an interpreter for a US Army unit just days after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Over the next two years, Fahdi would go on to translate for US drill sergeants training new Iraqi Army recruits in Ramadi; serve alongside US Marines during the first Battle of Fallujah; and eventually land a position as a linguist with Iraq's newly formed national intelligence agency in Baghdad. Along the way, he suffered combat injuries, faced the challenges of integrating with American soldiers in US camps, was hunted by local insurgency groups for assisting the "infidels"--and eventually fell in love with an American service member. As told to that service member--now his wife and the author of her own memoir, A Foreign Affair--this is a unique firsthand perspective on one of the United States' most controversial foreign conflicts.Author Biography
Amanda Matti served six years in the US Navy as an intel analyst and is an Iraq War veteran. She is the author of three books. Her memoir, A Foreign Affair, tells the story of her 2005 deployment to Baghdad, where she met her husband, an Iraqi national who served as her translator. Her second book, Voicing the Eagle, chronicles her husband's story of working as an interpreter for US forces in Iraq. Her latest work, New Dawn Underground, is a counter-terrorism thriller about a female CIA analyst who poses as a Washington Post journalist to infiltrate a terrorist organization in Iraq. Matti lives in San Diego with her husband, Fahdi, and their two daughters.
