Wounded Warriors: Those for Whom the War Never Ends by Mike Sager

From the Publisher

Lt. Col. Tim Maxwell prided himself on being a hard-core Marine—a patriotic Devil Dog on his third tour of Iraq. Then his brain was shredded with mortar shrapnel.

Today, Maxwell has a large angry scar on the left side of his head. He forgets words, his wife has to read to him, and he drags one foot when he walks. Yet he works twelve-hour days as commander of the Wounded Warrior Barracks at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. For these warriors, Iraq and Afghanistan will never quite be in the past. And the struggle never ends.

Other stories in Wounded Warriors depict life inside an L.A. crack gang, ex-pat Vietnam War veterans in Thailand, and five days in Las Vegas with basketball anti-hero Kobe Bryant—all of it captured stylishly by the writer who has been called “the beat poet of American journalism.”

Publishers Weekly

Veteran journalist Sager (Revenge of the Donut Boys) presents an amalgam of celebrity portraits and cautionary tales in a collection as addictive as the drugs and violence that fuel much of the author's reporting. The title story goes inside a pioneering program at Camp Lejeune, N.C., that helps wounded Marines-many suffering from traumatic brain injuries-return to society. In other pieces, Sager extends his war metaphor in portraits of the famous, the anonymous and the tragic: the "misunderstood" Kobe Bryant, Rev. Al Sharpton ("one of the most reviled men in America") and nightclub bouncer and "smartest man in America," Chris Langan. Some of the most compelling, and tragic, portraits are drawn from the darkest corners of American society: Generation H-"children of the nineties"-heroin addicts in New York City and teenage gang members in Venice, Calif. The author turns the spotlight on himself in "Hunting Marlon Brando," a highly personal and quixotic odyssey to track down the elusive actor. Sager has made a career of finding the unexpected story and telling it with empathy and narrative skill-a talent that's on display throughout this eclectic and consistently arresting collection. (Oct.)

Kirkus Reviews

Esquire writer at large Sager (Deviant Behavior, 2008, etc.) collects some of his bleakest investigative pieces in a downbeat but engrossing volume. The author chronicles the marginalized, forgotten and despised in cool, transparent prose that eschews judgment and melodrama. Horribly wounded young veterans of the Iraq War stagnate in a stateside dormitory, bodies damaged beyond repair, their futures uncertain-yearning, incredibly, to get back to the fight, wistfully watching videos of suicide bombings and firefights on YouTube. Young Puerto Rican boys living in abject poverty devote themselves to fighting pit bulls to the death in a Philadelphia slum. American expats drift through Thailand in a haze of lassitude and cheap sex. A spoiled middle-class kid succumbs to heroin in New York while once-proud gangbangers in Venice, Calif., forgo blood vendettas in favor of staying high on crack. The news is bad even when Sager profiles a group of people with extremely high IQs, finding most of them to be alienated, frustrated and lonely. Ironically, he shows the morbidly obese making a better go of things, dealing with a world scaled for smaller beings with mordant humor and admirable resourcefulness. A few stories fail to maintain interest. A snapshot of Al Sharpton causing trouble at Liberty Island is vivid and funny, but seems out of place here, as does a standard celebrity puff-piece on NBA star Kobe Bryant. A mild look at Hawaiian meth addicts doesn't make much of an impact within the context of the book's other devastating portraits of drug addiction. The collection ends with a strange, self-indulgent account of the author's quest to track down Marlon Brando on the actor's private island.Sager's voice is very different here-personal, full of pain, uncertainty and frustration-but his tale of self-delusion and obsession makes a fitting end-piece for a clear-eyed, upsetting volume whose primary subject is outsider culture and its discontents. Difficult but rewarding reading.

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Table of Contents