M.C. Armstrong is the author of The Mysteries of Haditha, published in 2020 by Potomac Books. The Brooklyn Rail called The Mysteries of Haditha one of the “Best Books of 2020,” and Armstrong’s story was nominated for “Best Memoir” at the 2021 American Book Festival. Armstrong, who grew up in Winchester, Virginia, embedded with Joint Special Operations Forces in Al Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2008. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. Armstrong is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Wrath-bearing Tree, Epiphany, War, Literature, and the Arts, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. In August of 2021 he sold his first novel, American Delphi, which will be published by Milspeak Books in 2022. He teaches writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and is the guitarist and lead singer-songwriter for Viva la Muerte, an original rock and roll band. You can follow him on Twitter @mcarmystrong.
“The Mysteries of Haditha is a unique and fascinating book. . . . This memoir is an account of the complex mixture of motives that led M. C. Armstrong [to Iraq], as well as his attempt to make sense of a war that was rapidly changing around him, and ever obscured by a haze of glamour and horror, masculine posturing, and political machinations.”
—Phil Klay, author of Redeployment, winner of the National Book Award
