Bill Murphy, Jr. '97 in Newsweek

In the June 15, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Bill Murphy, Jr. '97 interviews members of the West Point Class of 2009 in "Worried They Will Miss the War - Inside the Minds of West Point's Class of 2009." Murphy served on active duty with the Army Reserve from 2003 to 2005 and reported from Iraq for The Washington Post in 2007. His book about the West Point class of 2002, In a Time of War, was released in paperback last month.

In A Time of War was born as a footnote in a memo I wrote to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. In 2005, I applied to be Bob's research assistant on his next writing project, and as part of the interview process, he asked me to critique Plan of Attack, his book about President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. There's a scene in that book in which Bush announces a new foreign policy doctrine - one that ultimately put the country on the path to war in Iraq - and I was struck by the fact that Bush gave the speech at the West Point commencement in June 2002. If Bob hired me, I wrote in the footnote, he should ask me to locate a few members of the West Point class who graduated that day and find out how their lives were affected by Bush's new doctrine.

I got the job, and my first assignment was to follow up on the footnote. I tracked down several dozen members of the class of 2002 and started interviewing them. By then Bob's new book, State of Denial, went in a different direction, and I thought that was the end of it. Wrong: word of my research had spread, and now the class of 2002 was contacting me. And when your phone rings, and it's a soldier who's never told anyone about what he saw in Iraq, you listen.

After I finished my work on State of Denial, I went to Iraq embedded with the military, and shadowed some of the young officers from the class. And I continued to listen (and laugh and cry) as they talked about their spouses and their families, about the births of their children and the deaths of their brothers in arms, about the horrors of war and the beauty they found in small acts of kindness.

--Bill Murphy, Jr. '97