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When Benjamin Sledge landed in Ramadi, Iraq, it looked like an “all-out urban hellscape.” Bombed out buildings. Walls riddled with bullets. Massive craters in the ground. The smell was a mix of burning trash and human waste.
“It was kind of always on fire,” Sledge recalled.
He first arrived at Combat Outpost Steel, an Army post in the neighborhood of Ta’meem, in October 2006.
Ari David Blaff is a features writer with the National Post in Canada. Before that, he was a reporter at National Review and a Tablet Magazine fellow.
