With It or In It: Desert Shield and Desert Storm from the Loader's Hatch

Gulf War history as lived from the inside — honest, funny, occasionally terrifying, and deeply human.

August 1, 1990. A 20-year-old Army tank crewman is sitting on his tank, at the back line of a gunnery range in New Mexico when the radio announces that Iraq has invaded Kuwait. He already knows what it means.

With It or In It is the memoir of Bacil Donovan Warren, a Specialist (E-4) and M1A1 tank loader with C ("Cyclone") Troop of the U.S. Army's 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment—the "Brave Rifles"—during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. It's not a general's story, or a politician's story. It's a tanker's story: the view from the loader's hatch of an M1A1 Abrams from that gunnery range, through preparing for the deployment, all the way to crossing the berm into Iraq on February 24, 1991, and the triumphant return home.

Warren takes you through it all—the months of brutal Saudi heat, the surreal quiet of desert nights under a sky full of stars, the gallows humor of soldiers preparing for a war they hoped wouldn't come, and the four days of ground combat that brought it all to a sudden close. Along the way, he doesn't spare any details: burning waste barrels, cold showers, eating instant coffee packets dry to stay awake, and riding a school bus through a flash flood in the middle of a war zone.

With It or In It is essential reading for Gulf War veterans and their families, military history readers, fans of first-person combat memoirs, and anyone who wants to understand what Operation Desert Storm actually felt like on the ground.