Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs - Walker, JohnnySummary: This extraordinary story of the Iraqi translator "Johnny Walker," who risked his life working with the Navy SEALs to save countless American lives, reveals how his job made him and his family targets, forcing them to flee to California where he continues to work with the military, training new SEALs.
Booklist Reviews
If Walker, a pseudonym, told us his real name, he'd be endangering his family in Iraq. He lives now in the U.S. but was given the code name "Johnny Walker" by the SEALs when he was working in Iraq with the Americans as an interpreter. How did an Iraqi family man wind up accompanying the American SEALs on multiple missions, many of which resulted in the deaths of Iraqi citizens? It's not a complicated question: the author is a man who loves his country but hated what was being done to it by Saddam Hussein. When the American soldiers came, he saw a chance to help bring justice and peace back to his country. This is an excellent memoir, a story about the post-9/11 war in Iraq as told by someone who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider (he's not a military man). Coauthor DeFelice is a veteran military-fiction and -nonfiction writer, and it's easy to suspect that he provided much of the book's structure and narrative description. But the voice—earnest, disillusioned, passionate, patriotic—seems undeniably to be that of the pseudonymous "Johnny Walker."
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