For thirty-three-year-old Mohammed al-Rehaief, this decision - whether to risk his life and everything he held dear to save private First Class Jessica Lynch, an American soldier he did not know - was more than the everyday reckoning with death that permeates wartime. It was the culmination of a life spent at odds with the repressive regime that held his country. Mohammed's story is the tale of what it was like to come of age in a society where violence and betrayal were everyday events, where one in five adult males worked for the state's security apparatus, where a president-for-life demanded absolute loyalty and adulation. Despite his affluent upbringing and a well-connected uncle, Mohammed was hardly sheltered from the surreal cruelities of Iraq.

Not AR rated