Babylon by bus

This all-access, inside-out view of what the American occupation of Iraq really looks like on the ground is the story of two young Americans who went to Baghdad without any real plan and discovered they weren?t the only ones. Underqualified but ingenious, Ray and Jeff found work with the Coalition Provisional Authority providing humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people amid an appalling atmosphere of corruption, incompetence, and horror. Gritty and irreverent, this is a wild ride inside the Red Zone and a strikingly original portrait of the real Iraq."This delightful book is Innocents Abroad meets Fear and Loathing. The story of Jeff and Ray. two Valium-popping, hard-drinking, Red Sox-loving twenty-something do-gooders on their own buddy trip inside the mess of post-liberation Iraq is compulsively readable, hilariously irreverent, very sad, and very real all at once, and, for all the right reasons, it could well become a cult phenomenon." —Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Fall of Baghdad and Che Guevara"Weird, dumb, hilarious, wise—a book that makes you think, What the hell? And then you realize that's exactly the point. When the apocalypse comes, I want these guys to be my tour guides." —Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It AllA conversation with Ray LeMoine & Jeff Neumann, authors of Babylon by BusWhat motivated you to go to Iraq in the first place?RAY: The Red Sox 2003 American League Championship Series loss forced a few decisions about my future. At this point I had been selling YANKEES SUCK t-shirts at Fenway for five years—a long time to do something you never planned to do as a career. Jeff was my roommate at the time and the two of us decided to take a trip during baseball's off-season. Both of us had already done a fair bit of traveling, so going to the Middle East didn't seem too revolutionary. There was no set plan for Iraq, really. We went to Israel, and then to Jordan. In Amman, the peaceniks at our hostel gave us word that Baghdad was relatively safe and completely wild. There was a cheap bus; we took it. (Baghdad and its relative safety rocked us the morning after we got there with a car bombing that killed 26 and injured 100.)So you ended up taking a bus to Baghdad—is this where you got the title of your book?JEFF: We crossed into Iraq from Jordan on a Middle Eastern version of a Greyhound bus, only this one was decorated with a few bullet holes and full of women covered from head to toe in abayas and men wrapped in keffiyahs and wearing p

Year

2006

Language

English

Publisher

Penguin Group USA, Inc.

Editions

1

ISBN

9781429541527

Data source: Wikidata