Nancy B. Ronquillo

When my son brought back a dusty bag of disposable cameras from Iraq, I didn’t know that a few months later he would die in a car crash, dreading an inevitable second deployment to a warzone. The photographs gave clues about his Iraq war experiences and spurred me to search for anything from his childhood to shed light on what caused his death to help me bear the crushing grief. I came across astonishing signs that, even as a little boy, Matt knew on some level what was going to happen to him. I discovered links between Matt’s fate, my husband’s life as a combat veteran, and my destiny. I came to know how the ravages of past wars loom darkly, a shadowy presence and an intimate part of generations of my family’s life.

“A Soldier in the Family belongs on the shelf with accounts of the Iraq War’s domestic costs, not the combat literature, but the literature of the houses those soldiers came back to, and didn’t.”

– Chicago Book Review, 5-star review