Shade it Black
Death and After in Iraq
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Narrated by:
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Emily Durante
About this listen
In 2008, CBS' Chief Foreign Correspondent, Lara Logan, candidly speculated about the human side of the war in Iraq: "Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier. What does that look like? Who in America knows what that looks like? Because I know what that looks like, and I feel responsible for the fact that no one else does..." Logan's query raised some important yet ignored questions: How did the remains of American service men and women get from the dusty roads of Fallujah to the flag-covered coffins at Dover Air Force Base? And what does the gathering of those remains tell us about the nature of modern warfare and about ourselves? These questions are the focus of Jess Goodell's story, Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq.
Jess enlisted in the Marines immediately after graduating from high school in 2001, and in 2004 she volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps' first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq. Her platoon was tasked with recovering and processing the remains of fallen soldiers.
With sensitivity and insight, Jess describes her job retrieving and examining the remains of fellow soldiers lost in combat in Iraq, and the psychological intricacy of coping with their fates, as well as her own. Death assumed many forms during the war, and the challenge of maintaining one's own humanity could be difficult. Responsible for diagramming the outlines of the fallen, if a part was missing she was instructed to "shade it black." This insightful memoir also describes the difficulties faced by these Marines when they transition from a life characterized by self-sacrifice to a civilian existence marked very often by self-absorption. In sharing with us the story of her own journey, Goodell also helps us to better understand how PTSD affects female veterans. With the assistance of John Hearn, she has written one of the most unique accounts of America's current wars overseas yet seen.
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Story
While serving a portion of his time under the Special Operations Command, Benjamin Sledge fought to keep his humanity amid the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. But war never leaves its participants unscathed. In Where Cowards Go to Die, Sledge reveals an unflinchingly honest portrait of war that few dare to tell.
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Couldn't stop listening
- By Matthew Orlandi on 07-29-22
By: Benjamin Sledge
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Always Faithful
- A Story of the War in Afghanistan, the Fall of Kabul, and the Unshakable Bond Between a Marine and an Interpreter
- By: Thomas Schueman, Zainullah Zaki
- Narrated by: Patrick Kirchner, Wali Habib
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Band of Brothers meets Argo in this dramatic and heartfelt dual memoir of the war in Afghanistan told by two men from opposite worlds. Always Faithful entwines the stories of Marine Major Tom Schueman, and his friend and Afghan interpreter, Zainullah “Zak” Zaki, as they describe their parallel lives, converging paths, and unbreakable bond in the face of overwhelming danger, culminating in Zak and his family’s harrowing escape from Kabul.
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Great Read!
- By justin on 08-13-22
By: Thomas Schueman, and others
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Tough as They Come
- By: Travis Mills, Marcus Brotherton, Gary Sinise - foreword
- Narrated by: Travis Mills
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Thousands of soldiers die every year to defend their country. United States Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills was sure that he would become another statistic when, during his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, he was caught in an IED blast four days before his 25th birthday. Against the odds, he lived, but at a severe cost - Travis became one of only five soldiers from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to survive a quadruple amputation.
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So-so
- By Rachael Shook on 02-16-19
By: Travis Mills, and others
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I'm Still Standing
- From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen - My Journey Home
- By: Shoshana Johnson, M. L. Doyle
- Narrated by: Napiera Groves
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Shoshana Johnson, the first black female soldier in America's history to be taken as a prisoner of war, presents the much-anticipated story of her capture and imprisonment in Iraq and what happened after her rescue.
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Amazing
- By Amazon Customer on 05-13-19
By: Shoshana Johnson, and others
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Echo in Ramadi
- The Firsthand Story of U.S. Marines in Iraq's Deadliest City
- By: Scott A. Huesing
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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From the winter of 2006 through the spring of 2007, 250 marines from Echo Company, Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment, fought daily in the dangerous, dense city streets of Ramadi, Iraq, during the Multi-National Forces Surge ordered by President George W. Bush. The marines' mission: to kill or capture anti-Iraqi forces. Their experience: like being in hell. Now Major Scott A. Huesing, the commander who led Echo Company through Ramadi, takes listeners back to the streets of Ramadi in a visceral, gripping portrayal of modern urban combat.
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Combat is Combat
- By Calvin Guthrie on 05-21-18
By: Scott A. Huesing
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Charlie Mike
- A True Story of War and Finding the Way Home
- By: Joe Klein
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In Charlie Mike, Joe Klein tells the dramatic story of Eric Greitens and Jake Wood, larger-than-life war heroes who come home and use their military discipline and values to help others. This is a story that hasn't been told before, one of the most hopeful to emerge from Iraq and Afghanistan - a saga of lives saved, not wasted.
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Thank you for all. Aco. 2/14TH INF 10TH MNT
- By Wolf on 07-14-20
By: Joe Klein
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Thank You for Your Service
- By: David Finkel
- Narrated by: Arthur Bishop
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous surge, a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now Finkel has followed many of those same men as they’ve returned home and struggled to reintegrate - both into their family lives and into American society at large.
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Wrenching
- By Scott on 01-03-14
By: David Finkel
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Touching the Dragon
- And Other Techniques for Surviving Life's Wars
- By: James Hatch, Christian D'Andrea
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith, James Hatch
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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James Hatch is a former special ops Navy SEAL senior chief, master naval parachutist, and expert military dog trainer and handler. His fateful final mission in Afghanistan went south, and Hatch was left with a shattered femur from an AK-47 round and the SEAL dog who fought alongside him was dead. As a result of his horrific leg wound, his 24-year military career came to an end - and with it the only life he’d ever known. In Touching the Dragon, we witness his long road to recovery.
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Rare Honesty - Raw and Well Written
- By Diana on 06-02-18
By: James Hatch, and others
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Hope Unseen
- The Story of the U.S. Army's First Blind Active-Duty Officer
- By: Scotty Smiley, Doug Crandall
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Blindness became Captain Scotty Smiley’s journey of supreme testing. As he lay helpless in the hospital, he resented the theft of his dreams, but with his wife’s love and the support of family and friends, Scotty’s response became God’s transforming moment. Since the moment he forced his way through nurses and cords to take a simple shower, he has climbed Mount Rainier, won an ESPY Award, surfed, skydived, become a father, earned an MBA from Duke, and much more.
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Perseverance with a little help
- By Kevin P Key on 07-09-16
By: Scotty Smiley, and others
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The Way Forward
- Master Life's Toughest Battles and Create Your Lasting Legacy
- By: Robert O'Neill, Dakota Meyer
- Narrated by: Robert O'Neill, Dakota Meyer
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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American Sniper meets Make Your Bed in these life lessons from decorated United States service members and New York Times bestselling authors Robert O’Neill and Dakota Meyer—an in-depth, fearless, and ultimately redemptive account of what it takes to survive and thrive on battlefields from Afghanistan and Iraq to our daily lives, and how the perils of war help us hold onto our humanity.
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Hit with emotions
- By Josh on 03-12-22
By: Robert O'Neill, and others
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Pumpkinflowers
- A Soldier's Story
- By: Matti Friedman
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Using humor, pop culture, and even musical references, Michael Friedman re-creates the wartime experience in a narrative that is part memoir, part journalism, part military history. The years in question were pivotal ones, seeing the perfection of a type of warfare that would eventually be exported to Afghanistan and Iraq and has come to seem like the only kind of warfare in existence - wars in which there is never any clear victory, but not quite enough lives are lost to rally the country against it.
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Israeli Defense Fighter’s Story of War in Lebanon
- By Debbie on 05-02-19
By: Matti Friedman
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Vietnam
- There & Back: A Combat Medic's Chronicle
- By: Jim "Doc" Purtell
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Vietnam - There & Back: A Combat Medic's Chronicle is a candid account of the time when Jim Purtell and several other combat vets found themselves conducting operations in the jungles of Vietnam during and after the Tet Offensive. Purtell describes in gritty detail what it was like to live and fight with an infantry company only to return to anti-Vietnam sentiment so strong that he and his fellow veterans felt nobody cared about them or the sacrifices they made.
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Great book!
- By Mike on 01-09-19
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What It Is Like to Go to War
- By: Karl Marlantes
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1969, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty marines who would live or die by his decisions. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his war experience.
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Destined to become a Classic
- By Lynn on 09-05-11
By: Karl Marlantes
What listeners say about Shade it Black
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gillian
- 03-25-14
Credit-Worthy Slug to the Gut
One of my earliest memories, I swear, is of seeing large, black bags being slung by American GIs into helicopters in Vietnam. I remember asking my mother what on earth was being taken out of Vietnam? I mean, shouldn't there be things brought into the country? Supplies, etc? She told me, young as I was, "Those aren't supplies. Those are the bodies of the boys who were just killed. It's the dead young men."
I was floored. Death was… inconceivable. As I watched the TV, I wondered what was going on. How could we, as a country, as human beings just let this go on?
Through the rest of the war, and all the following wars, I've kept myself aware of that one fact: people are dying, and it's ugly, and it's permanent. I thought I knew what was going on.
"Shade It Black" taught me how little I've known about the godawful, horrific truth. The title is based on the protocol for those working in Mortuary Affairs: A paper is used with the drawing of a person on it. For wounds, points of bullet entry, put a dot or an x on the drawing. If an arm, a leg, some body part is missing from an IED or other explosion, shade it black.
And in the war, there's a lot of that. This is a woman's unflinching account of what it's like to work in Mortuary Affairs. The endless scooping up of as much of what used to be human beings as they can, all in an effort to send as much of that soldier back to loved ones as is possible. It's about trying to eat when you realize that much of your food smells like the roasted flesh of dead soldiers. The dawning realization that you're looking at living soldiers, seeing them as dead, and wondering what's in their pockets, what will be sent back home as part of personal possessions. That napkin that Marine just stuffed in his pocket? What will the people back home make of that? In their grief, loved ones will give it special significance.
Things like that broke my heart. But it doesn't stop there. Because not only does this set her apart from the rest of the Marines, who shun MA people like a jinx or the plague, she's an outcast because she's a female Marine. And when she gets home, she's an outcast because nobody can possibly, in a million years, truly understand what her PTSD is like. Even other soldiers, fellow MA workers, are out of reach because the unity one feels when one is at war doesn't quite carry over to civilian life where everybody is just trying to get along. Though the war has been survived, the carnage lived through, she comes home to find that everything, hope especially, has been shaded black.
This is barely over five hours, but I definitely don't regret spending a credit on it. It was mind-blowing, gut-wrenching, and ultimately, hopeful. Before listening to this, I'd gone through "On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery," and I was touched by that book. It made me cry, and it made me proud. I'm glad I listened to it. But I'm glad I listened to it first. Because after listening to "Shade It Black"? All I can think about is: touching, yes. But oh what horrors there are in war...
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- Cristi Erickson
- 03-19-15
Non-warfare WM Learning from Warfare WM
This was a very straight-forward, almost clinical, description of one Marine's experience in Iraq, a Marine who is also a woman. While listening to the audiobook, I felt like I could see through her eyes, and in so doing, I could better understand what it was like for a woman to be in a combat zone. It brought back memories of my time in the Corps, but it also enlightened me concerning the side I never experienced. Well done, Marine. Thank you.
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- JuYoRican Jarhead
- 11-26-19
I’ve been there, too Sister...
I am also a Female Marine veteran who served around the same period as this author and was stationed in Iraq near her unit during the same time here, and I’ve unfortunately dealt with them re: the morbid side of war as well (but, never personally met her, basically for the exact reasons the author mentioned):
I was enlisted aircrew (flight navigator) on KC-130’s, with a Marine unit who had been frequently charged with the heady obligation for flying these same KIA (Killed-In-Action) service members on the first leg of their long, somber journey home to their loved ones and/or final resting place, especially in 2004. (The military began calling them “Angel Flights.”) Usually, we received the KIA remains in the metal container “coffins” draped in US flags — like she stated — in Al Taqaddum AB, Iraq and then transported them to another airbase at the Kuwaiti border. From there, we passed them respectfully along to the USAF’s long-range jets that were neither safely or logistically able to fly into that extremely violent area of Iraq where her unit was stationed.
“TQ” (as we called the Airbase) was in the Iraqi Al Anbar providence, the same perilous region that was notoriously infested with insurgents and where most of our troops and countless civilians became tragic casualties in 2004 (eg. both Fallujah and Ramadi reside within that western providence that stretches all the way to the Syrian border and where ISIL was spawned). By October 2004, the Marine Mortuary Affairs unit there were no longer able to keep up with the overwhelming workload that resulted from the Second Battle of Fallujah (“Operation Phantom Fury”), when we suffered hundreds of casualties in a matter of days. During Phantom Fury though, sometimes we were flying body bags to Kuwait — it was sheer, macabre chaos by the time the author rotated out of country.
I found her narrative to ring mostly true for this time-period, although I remember a few things differently, eg. that the KIA remains were sent next to another (larger, more comprehensive) US Military Mortuary Affairs unit in Germany to undergo one last post-mortem exam (including a DNA ID verification, especially for the most extremely difficult cases) and where they’re thoroughly examined (and x-rayed) to veritably ensure that no live rounds or hazardous ordnance within the decedent’s remains before they’re finally flown stateside to the Mortuary Affairs HQ at Dover AB.
The author doesn’t really explain why they all end up in Dover: this HQ is the final bottleneck for all deceased US military personnel worldwide, who died by any means during their active service: where they are cleaned up cosmetically and moved into an actual funeral coffin — much like what’s typically done in most funeral homes — after being outfitted properly in their regulation dress uniform for an optional “open coffin” viewing presentation (or their uniform is laid out inside the coffin, if dressing them for viewing is unfortunately not feasible, ie. the tragic “closed coffin” scenarios). This is where the US military’s main strategic function is solely to honor the fallen individual and hopefully mitigate their bereaved loved ones’ suffering any further, by making the fallen soldier/sailor/airman/Marine presentable for their viewing, if at all possible. Then finally, the last leg of their journey is reached when the outfitted coffin is then escorted to wherever their last wishes were to be laid out, eulogized, given military funeral honors, and/or put to rest, while usually attempting to also accommodate any religious preferences, plus their mourning families and/or communities as well. The author’s assertion of her meticulous dedication to both the deceased and their perceived bereft loved ones is the definite norm for all those who selflessly volunteer for this sacred tour of duty at the risk of enduring some significant psychological repercussions.
As a female Marine, I will corroborate the validity of her struggles to be a woman in the male-domineering Marine Corps back then as well. (It’s sounds outrageous because it definitely is stupefyingly surreal, but nonetheless it’s absolutely true for that time period, if not still an ongoing malignant issue.) Sadly, also true-to-life is the prevalent PTSD and also frequently dealing with Marine veteran buddies struggling with (and too often succumbing to) suicide, which is a constant burden for almost all those veterans still surviving after enduring some of the worst aspects of a convoluted war. (One that’ll probably never make any logical/moral sense in hindsight to almost all of us who served in it.)
Now, to critique a bit and then summarize: I didn’t entirely agree personally with everything she expressed (on esoteric matters of philosophical perceptions, which typically varies from one Marine to another, eg. re: the morality Catch-22 with the pervasive intolerance/hazing within the Corps), also I was MORE than a little disappointed with the toned-down language (I assume that was the coauthor’s and/or editors’ idea), which IMO definitely diluted the authenticity of the author’s voice, because of how Marines truly speak, ESPECIALLY when they speak about Marine-specific matters: it SHOULD be raw and shocking, just like the subject matter. (I would do it here myself if I wasn’t positive the effin’ censors would delete my post.)
(The narrator of the audiobook was not convincing either, she didn’t exert any assertiveness in her voice, no illusions of fortitude to match the author’s own passion in the prose, FAR too timid IMO to believe this was coming from a US Marine (often pronounced basic Marine jargon incorrectly... Marines will be better off with the book or the Kindle instead.)
With that all said, I do hope Goodell’s book and overall message here reaches a very wide audience (especially all those “patriotic” well-meaning civilians who are in dire need of a wake up call). I give the Audible Version 4 stars (& Kindle Version 4.5 stars) overall and definitely recommend this to others: from the salty OIF veterans to the truly nascent civilians alike.
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- Jude
- 11-01-17
as a veteran
as a vet its painful reading about the demise of our military women and men
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- visionaryprism2
- 08-26-23
Gory but compelling
This is a deeply introspective book about death and the confrontational political implications of war casualties which presents more than meets the eye.
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- Tasha N Samudio
- 09-04-15
female portrayal of mortuary affairs in the marine
it was kind of hard to listen to what this Maine went through in sending our msrines home after giving the ultimate sacrifice. I enjoyed hearing it all from a woman's prospective.
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