But Mejía was to find out that the military's promises came with strings attached. He served his four years on active duty with distinction; however, every soldier actually signs an eight-year contract, a reality that was never fully disclosed to him until he was separating from the Army.

In order to get additional funding for school, he then entered the National Guard. However, he soon learned that the Guard did not pay tuition at the private school he was attending.

Mejía describes the lies that are the bedrock of military recruitment. "I was disappointed in the system," he writes. "It preyed on the vulnerability of people, exploiting the lack of options to get them to sign up, and subsequently tied them into service with the constant promise of benefits that were just around the corner."

A bigger shock was still to come. In January 2003--with only months until he both graduated from college and completed his military contract--Mejía's unit was activated for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and his service was extended under a "stop-loss order."

Mejía didn't know that according to the law, "stop-loss" didn't officially apply to non-citizens like himself; the military concealed this fact from him. He left with his unit for Jordan and ultimately to Ar Ramadi, the heart of the Sunni Triangle and the emerging Iraqi resistance.

Mejía's "sense of belonging" to a "military family" began to fracture. He awakened to the realities of the military bureaucracy, an institution that mirrored the class divisions rampant in the civilian world.

A culture of competition for higher rank and wartime medals, including backstabbing and jockeying for power, exposed Mejía to the fact that the true enemy resided within the military itself. His National Guard unit was riddled with officers and career soldiers hell-bent on seeing combat in order to win the coveted Combat Infantry Badge, a prerequisite for higher rank.

From the beginning, Mejía's unit, Charlie Company, was ill-equipped, rushed and unprepared. "Rumors that someone at the battalion level forged documents to get our units into combat more quickly were reinforced when we landed in Baghdad and found there was no unit waiting for us, no orders, no place to sleep, not even food or water," Mejía reported.

In Ar Ramadi, what seemed on the surface to be the incompetence of the officers turned out to be, in fact, part and parcel of a master scheme based upon the slaughter of the Iraqi people, and paid at the price of U.S. soldiers' lives.

As Mejía explained, "Somewhere there had been a meeting, in some fancy office, where some grand plan had been discussed by detached people. The plan required the loss of many lives in order to reach the goals, but it was all acceptable. My life and the lives of those in my unit were all part of that acceptable loss."

Reminiscent of the Vietnam War, the lower ranks of Charlie Company were sent out on suicide missions to draw enemy fire. The unit would stay out on patrols that were longer than necessary and repeatedly occupy the same area at similar times--thus giving up the element of surprise.

It became obvious to Mejía that they were merely acting as bait and putting the lives of the rank-and-file soldiers in grave danger while the career officers sat in the protection of their air-conditioned rooms. When the death toll rose sharply in Charlie Company and as the Battalion Commander, Lt. Col. Mirable, ordered the same dangerous missions, rumors circulated that members of the company were plotting his assassination.

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