On the Anniversary of the Gulf War, Veteran Author Looks Back

Added: (Fri Jan 25 2002)

Pressbox (Press Release) - News Release
For Immediate Release: January 16, 2002

Contact: Charles Sheehan-Miles, 703-980-8451; http://www.rumayla.com

Vienna, VA – Gulf War veteran activist and author Charles Sheehan-Miles raises tough issues with his groundbreaking novel on the Gulf War, Prayer at Rumayla. The novel was officially released last week, on the 11th Anniversary of the Gulf War.

The book has received very positive reviews, including one last month from Gannett News Service, written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Hanchette. Gannett owns and publishes 97 daily newspapers across the United States and United Kingdom. The book also received a favorable review from the Vietnam Veterans of America’s “Veteran” magazine, out this week. It has received endorsements from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh and controversial former CIA analyst Patrick Eddington.
Gannett’s Hanchette wrote that Prayer at Rumayla is “a bleak and disturbing remembrance of a past conflict that could contain intimations of the near future… Author Charles Sheehan-Miles alternates a blistering narrative with a hybrid stream of consciousness style to produce an account of front-line combat in vast contradiction of the sanitized version the Pentagon produced for TV consumption in 1991…. Gone are the game-like ‘smart’ bomb videos, computerized reconstructions of death, and bloodless explosion photos from thousands of feet in the air…. They are replaced with the gritty, sometimes depressing, sometimes exhilarating, dangerous daily existence of a man who finds that gore and killing in the short term don’t really bother him as much as he thought – but in the long run drive him crazy with guilt, remorse, and self-directed anger.”
The novel, published by Sheehan-Miles with Xlibris Corporation, a strategic partner of Random House ventures, has already received significant critical attention. Frequent New Yorker contributor Seymour M. Hersh, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, wrote that Prayer at Rumayla is “honest and unsparing...a much-needed corrective about a much-misunderstood war.”
Charles Sheehan-Miles, a resident of Northern Virginia and the District of Columbia since 1995, served as an M1A1 Abrams tank crewman during the Gulf War. His combat experiences in the war have been profiled in a number of documentaries and articles on the war, including Discovery Channel’s “Inside the Kill Box: Fighting the Gulf War,” and Patrick Eddington’s “Gassed in the Gulf.” He has served on the board of directors of the Washington-based Gulf War veterans’ advocacy group the National Gulf War Resource Center, and has been one of the leading figures in the fight to assist ill Gulf War veterans since 1991.
Prayer at Rumayla by Charles Sheehan-Miles. XLibris Corp. 222 pages. $21.99 http://www.rumayla.com. ISBN 1-4010-3045-9