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Jeff and Ray had la vida: selling YANKEES SUCK T-shirts five months of the year in front of Fenway Park and spending the rest of the year traveling the world. Sure, they'd go back to college at some point, but for now, the future was comfortably on hold. But the play button got pushed for them after the Sox broke their hearts in the 2003 Series. In the painfully clear light of the morning after, they looked at each other and faced up to the fact that they were in danger of becoming losers. Sad cases. What to do, where to go if you're a young American man craving experience and wisdom in late 2003? If you're Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine, you go to Baghdad. And so they did.

You might not think these two scruffy, lovably clueless characters would have made attractive candidates for the U.S. government to run the desk in Baghdad's Coalition Provisional Authority that served as the interface between the CPA and the Iraqi people, fielding complaints and requests for aid from all over for a city of more than five million people. You might be naïve. But Ray and Jeff would prove to be dedicated and ingenious public servants, and they managed to do a great deal of good during their tenure in the face of staggering frauds and feuds. They also had their full share of the wild times that young people under immense stress in war zones have had from time immemorial, especially young people who return each night to a hermetically sealed safe zone flush with money and all the temptations, legal and illegal, that money attracts.

Hard-core smart, hard-core scathing, hard-core funny, this is Apocalypse Right Now-explosive and appalling. 'Roid rage fueling gang wars between rival private-security contractors; staggering fraud involving phantom construction projects; naïve young Americans given responsibilities for which their lack of qualification would be laughable if the consequences weren't so dire-this is the inside-out view of an occupation gone wildly wrong, from the point of view of two radically unaffiliated authors, members of no tribe, beholden to no one, and afraid of nothing.
Customer Review: A unique perspective
There's plenty of literature out there on the Iraq war, most of it written by journalists, pundits, and government or military employees. Here we have a book by two young men who came to Iraq as backpackers with nothing better to do. Rarely sober and sometimes not very sensitive to the culture they're visiting, Ray and Jeff are not always likeable people. They did manage to make a positive difference in Iraq through their humanitarian volunteer work in Baghdad, which took them to areas few American civilians would have the guts to explore. This book tells the story of their work and the people they meet- soldiers, profiteers, mercenaries, journalists, and drifters alike. It makes for an interestinig anecdote on how the collapse of a tenuous, temporary peace in Iraq looked to two foreign laymen watching from the inside. If you're looking for a story of the war as told by military tactical experts or experienced political and cultural analysts, look elsewhere.
Customer Review: Insights unique outside of the occupying forces.
BABYLON BY BUS is for any counter-culture reader or autobiography fan who wants something different: a kind of Kerouac bus trip extended overseas to Iraq. The two young, directionless American men went to Baghdad in 2003 in search of truth and adventure, giving up their jobs selling 'Yankees Suck' t-shirts at Fenway and becoming volunteers for the U.S. Government Coalition's Provisional Authority. BABYLON BY BUS recounts their eye-opening new duties as volunteers, which allowed them access to the streets of Baghdad and gave them insights unique outside of the occupying forces. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch


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