Wheels on Fire: My Year of Driving and Surviving in Iraq

Michelle Zaremba joined the Ohio National Guard expecting to be called upon to deal with natural disasters. Instead, in 2004, her unit was called up for posting to Iraq. Through this memoir and her letters which were sent home and published in a local paper, she recounts her daily life with a compelling honesty and clarity. She was assigned to a convoy unit, driving trucks to deliver supplies to camps all over Iraq. This work gave her an unusual opportunity to see how soldiers were living and surviving all over the country. She describes how they dealt with incredible heat and cold, bugs, sand storms, and poor equipment. The most striking part of the story to me was her description of how they arrived in Iraq without sufficient supplies, soldiers arriving with no flack jackets, trucks with no armor or even doors. It is a tribute to their intelligence and ingenuity that they were able to find ways to work together to provide support for each other. I was also impressed with how she writes about the Iraqis with compassion and understanding even as she describes how she had to regard them as potential enemies. Also interesting is how she dealt with being a woman in command. She was a staff sergeant and often in command of the convoy but Army rules regarding the separation of females made it sometimes impossible to connect with the men under her command. Her story is told in a straightforward way, without any sense of being a victim or pointing fingers. This is a compelling look at day to day life in Iraq. I highly recommend this book.