The Longer We Were There
A Memoir of a Part-Time Soldier
Recipient of the 2018 AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction
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"The Longer We Were There is both a tale of our longest war and an astute coming of age memoir, the story of an English major who finds himself filling sandbags as an Iowa National Guardsman one day and deployed on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border the next. The prose is marked throughout by his compelling voice and precise description, and like Heller, Herr, and O’Brien before him, he understands that war can often be most hellish in its tedium. The Longer We Were There is an honest, absorbing, sharply-observed narrative that questions both the nature of war and the nature of the stories we tell ourselves."
- Dinty W. Moore, 2018 AWP Award Series Judge