Our guest, Dylan Park-Pettiford, is a writer, director, and author from the San Francisco Bay Area. He served as a member of the military for six years, including a deployment in Iraq during the Iraq War. Dylan wrote for the popular courtroom drama, ALL RISE, and served as a writer and consultant for 68 WHISKEY, which follows a group of army medics deployed to a forward operating base in Afghanistan.
Dylan recently released his new book Roadside: My Journey to Iraq and the Long Road Home. A military memoir by a biracial child of refugees and survivors, Roadside is about life and death, about family lost and gained, and about America, as a dream and a reality. In a world marred by a seemingly endless wave of negativity, this story of love, loss, and brotherhood may offer a faint glimmer of hope as we face an uncertain future.
In this episode, we talk with Dylan about his time in Iraq as part of the US Military, the impact it had on his mental health, and what it was like to return home to a world that had moved on without him, especially when the violence he thought he’d left in the Middle East followed him home.
“An indelible story of war and survival. Roadside is a portrait of America, its wars, and the kids who fight them. It is also a map of the funny, tortured, and heartbreaking journey they must undertake if they want to return home.”—Elliot Ackerman, award-winning author of On Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning
CW: We discuss PTSD, suicidal ideation, addiction, murder, and homelessness in this episode.
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