by Johnny Rico
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Product Description
Outrageous, hilarious, and absolutely candid, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green is Johnny Rico’s firsthand account of fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, a memoir that also reveals the universal truths about the madness of war.
No one would have picked Johnny Rico for a soldier. The son of an aging hippie father, Johnny was overeducated and hostile to all authority. But when 9/11 happened, the twenty-six-year-old probation officer dropped everything to become an “infantry combat killer.”
But if he’d thought that serving his country would be the kind of authentic experience a reader of The Catcher in the Rye would love, he quickly realized he had another thing coming. In Afghanistan he found himself living a Lord of the Flies existence among soldiers who feared civilian life more than they feared the Taliban–guys like Private Cox, a musical prodigy busy “planning his future poverty,” and Private Mulbeck, who didn’t know precisely which country he was in. Life in a combat zone meant carnage and courage–but it also meant tedious hours standing guard, punctuated with thoughtful arguments about whether Bea Arthur was still alive.
Utterly uncensored and full of dark wit, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green is a poignant, frightening, and heartfelt view of life in this and every man’s army.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A hilarious & horrifying look at the war on terror, 2008-12-02
I found this book in a Borders store in Vegas a couple years ago. I hated Vegas so much I needed to find a diversion. This book did the trick. BMtGGG is perhaps one of the most honest and funniest books about the US Military - and this particular war - that's yet been written. Rico admits up front that he's no hero. He is not. He is Everyman, trying to stay alive and also to beat the boredom of all those in-between times of the horror of war. The sin of Onan was never so funny as it is here. And there is plenty of "spilled seed" at these lonely Afghan outposts as soldiers dream of home and girls. I was reminded of similar stuff in Jarhead, Tony Swofford's memoir of the first Gulf War. I recognize that war is no laughing matter, but people are always funny, and the ludicrous FUBAR stuff perpetrated by the military as evidenced here is all too true to life. I know. I spent eight years in the army. Rico tells it the way it really is, and isn't afraid to poke fun at himself in the process. This is good stuff. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A Unique Self-Styled Memoir of Combat. , 2008-09-20
Review of: "Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green" -- Johnny Rico.
In this novel nom de plume Author "Johnny Rico" provides his readers with a poignant first hand account of his combat tour fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
I found the book, as written from the perspective of that of a lower enlisted soldier, to be quite relevant in describing the daily hardships, relationships, anxieties, folly and foibles experienced by U.S. soldiers attempting to tame the Afghan countryside. For that reason I place a high value on the nature of this work.
I knocked through the book's 318 pages in a few sittings finding it to hold my attention and interest with minimal bogging in spots.
Regardless, the book was successful in providing me with a perspective of insurgent fighting I had never heard of before. For that I would recommend the book as being "well done."
Five stars.
JP
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Disappointing, 2008-03-22
A good topic that kept me interested. Unfortunately, I thought the writing was immature and a bit self-serving.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Something Doesn't seem Right..., 2008-03-01
Well it wasn't all bad, it certainly brings up some of the things the army doesn't like to tell us about like those re-enlistment "Incentives" but the over all writing of the book seems rather childish especially for an older person with university etc.
But certain things are just not right. Most glaringly is the fact that Rico couldn't have been in the 5/2 Bobcats 25th ID because quite simply that unit doesn't exist in the 25th Division. Perhaps he meant 2nd Battalion 5th Infantry 'Bobcats' in which case perhaps he really was. Even a pathetic soldier like Rico would surely know his own unit seeing as he spent 3 years of his life there.
I'd love to see his Personal Record and see for real what he really did in the Army if in fact he was at all.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Blood makes the grass grow green, 2008-01-07
Wow i could not put it down for fear of missing out on the next line.
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