Dahr Jamail, freelance journalist and rescue ranger, was standing on Denali, Alaska’s highest peak, when it occurred to him that he should go to Iraq. While he tried to convince himself that his reasons were altruistic and philosophical, he had to finally admit their personal nature: “I felt that I had blood on my hands because the government had been left unchecked.”

Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 978-1931859-47-9) begins eleven days before the Iraqi elections and two months after the start of the siege of Fallujah, when Jamal awakens as the windows of his hotel room shatter and the door explodes off its frame. A suicide car bomb has just detonated across the street, a base for Australian soldiers. “Two smoldering bits of a vehicle sit near the building, and two bodies lay in pools of blood across the street,” he writes. “Adjacent to the Australian outpost a small building that was under construction has its right ceiling collapsed—the gray concrete slumping down tiredly onto the floor beneath. A small date palm between the two buildings stands limply; half its drooping, green palm fronds closest to the bomb still smoldering.” Five more car bombs would blow across the city in the next hour and a half, killing more than twenty-six people. Jamail has spent a total of eight months in Baghdad over the last two years, writing daily dispatches from his hotel room and sending them out to a list of 130 friends along with a photo or two. He’s beginning to wonder “what the hell I’m doing in Iraq.”

Jamail’s dispatches come from first-hand reportage and the mouths of ordinary Iraqis. The scenes are often surreal: crumpled wreckage of men and machines, the marble floors and silk curtains of a hotel. Soccer fields turn into graveyards. Gas prices rise from $1.70 to $20.40 a gallon in a few weeks. The public hijacking of a car and the beating of the driver is explained as the deterrence of a looter. Both the good guys and the bad wear masks. The author’s boots-on-the-ground reportage is spliced with official releases coming from the Green Zone, and their discontinuity is jarring. When Americans report the death of fifty-four insurgents in a raid, the locals wonder where the bodies are, for they only count eight, and all of them civilians.

The capture of Saddam Hussein is another instant of disconnect and failed control. Everyone in Baghdad knew that Saddam was betrayed, located, and turned over (drugged) to the Americans by the members of a Kurdish tribe, retaliating for the rape of a daughter by Saddam’s son, Uday. Cynical of the spin, one citizen declared that the press hullabaloo was a ploy to “…get our minds off the terrible situation here—with no gas, no electricity. They don’t want us to talk about how terrible it is here.”

The siege of Fallujah was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The growing nationalism in Iraq, says Jamal, became the only defense against the occupiers’ tactics of fear and intimidation. “The display of brute force that the U.S. military unleashed on the people of Fallujah underscored how the guerrillas had Goliath both frustrated and angry. As the occupation forces rushed headlong into this trap, the message was clear to all Iraqis: their well-being was of little or no interest to the occupiers who had come to liberate them,” he writes.

Beyond the Green Zone is a chronicle of decay, frustration, chaos, and dreams destroyed. It will no doubt appear as a primary source in future histories of the Iraq War. For the ordinary reader, these stories of ordinary people will reverberate with the sorrowful toll of broken lives. “Whether we accept that or not,” Jamail writes at the end of his book, “it is the truth. The water from the Euphrates runs through all our veins.”