Damon is a typical, 8 year-old military “brat,” whose father has gone to war in Iraq. Safi is a Kurdish girl who lives on the edge of a war zone. This story brings together the people who have personally touched their lives and chronicles the contributions that they made themselves.
Damon lives in Colorado Springs and waits for his father to come home, but he finds that things do not return to normal when his father, a Special Forces soldier, steps back into his family’s lives. Upon returning from the war in 2003, Damon has to reconnect with his father while trying to prepare to move back to Germany. Damon finds that his father is angry and frustrated with everything around him, and his family takes the brunt of it. In an attempt to reconcile one night, Damon and his father talk about the operations and frustration in Northern Iraq and Damon suggests ways to solve some of the difficulties in the remote villages.
Damon and his father make a proposal to assist a large village. Damon shows his courage and savvy in front of the Colorado Springs Executive Committee of the Chamber of Commerce and City Council. Effectively, they lead local businessmen, private citizens, and city politicians to assist in the partial reconstruction of Iraq.

Safi looks after her Papa’s goats in the Kurdish Autonomous Zone (the “KAZ”) of Northern Iraq. During Saddam’s reign, Safi’s mother was taken away as a dissident and her brother was killed by a land mine, which also crippled her father. She finds hope when her father offers shelter to the US Special Operations Officer, who becomes a hero to their village.
Through the opening days of the war in the North, Safi witnesses first-hand the impact of the US Special Operations presence in the KAZ and the destruction wrought upon the Iraqi military. While television crews well-documented the war as “the race to Baghdad,” more than 75% of Saddam’s forces were held in check in the North by small, effective members of the Joint Special Operations Task Force – North (code named: Task Force VIKING) and the Kurdish Peshmerge militia. This story demonstrates it through the eyes of a child.

The impacts of the war are not only measured in the casualties and destroyed pieces of equipment, but in the effects on human life. This story of the war and its affects on two families traces the ties that will forever bind the US military with the Kurdish people in the North.