Military contractor Carter Andress was the ultimate boots-on-the-ground "civilian" in Iraq. While reporters, aid workers, diplomats, and even U.S. soldiers were often cut off from the "ground truth" in Iraq by the blast walls protecting the Green Zone and our bases, Andress was in the thick of things: driving through insurgent-infested territory, negotiating with hostile tribes, and witnessing the transformation of Iraq from chaos and violence to a stable multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy that needed only minimal American support to defend itself--support, however, that thanks to the Obama administration was not forthcoming.

In Andress's exciting and insightful book, Victory Undone, you'll learn:

• How Andress's company employed 10,000 Iraqis and hauled everything from barbed wire to frozen lamb to drinking water across the IED-plagued roads of Iraq to isolated and often besieged bases


• How Andress and his team safely trucked 140 truckloads of low-grade uranium--Saddam Hussein's "yellowcake"--from the Iraqi dictator's nuclear facility to the Baghdad International Airport (ISIS now controls nuclear material that they did not transport)


• How Andress and his company played a vital role in rallying Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to unite behind the Government of Iraq's fight against al-Qaeda


• How the Obama administration undermined negotiations for a new "Status of Forces Agreement"--with the consequence that ISIS, the Syria-based reincarnation of al-Qaeda in Iraq, could enter the country with a terrorist army

Here is a dramatic, first-person account of how the United States won the war in Iraq, only to see the peace lost by an unengaged administration, with Iraqis terrorized, and the new "caliph" of ISIS promising, "I'll see you in New York."

A page-turner of a story, but also an incredibly important account of what actually happened in the Iraq War and after, Victory Undone is a book every American needs to read.