A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN

by DANA CANEDY

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New softcover book, 282 pages, published 2009.

What would you say to the ones you love if you thought you were never coming home?

In 2005, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, First Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, began to write what would become a 200-page journal for his son in case he did not make it home from the war in Iraq. King, forty-eight, was killed on October 14, 2006 when an improvised explosive device detonated under his Humvee on an isolated road near Baghdad. His son, Jordan, was seven months old.

A Journal for Jordan is a father's letter to the son he will never see - wrenching accounts of losing men in battle mixed with life lessons on everything from how to withstand disappointment to how to behave on a date. A father figure to the soldiers under his command, Charles moved naturally into writing to his son. In neat block letters, he counseled him on everything from how to withstand disappointment and deal with adversaries to how to behave on a date. And he also wrote, from his tent, of recovering a young soldier’s body, piece by piece, from a tank–and the importance of honoring that young man’s life. He finished the journal two months before his death while home on a two-week leave, so intoxicated with love for his infant son that he barely slept.

It is also a mother's search for answers. Why did King volunteer for the mission that killed him? Why was it such a struggle to accept this man she deeply loved as he was? Dana Canedy has taken Charles's words and included them in her own mesage to her son to read when he is fully grown - about the father he lost before he could even speak, about the human cost of war.

Finally, this is the story of Dana and Charles together - two seemingly mismatched souls who loved each other deeply. She was a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor for the New York Times who struggled with her weight. He was a decorated military officer with a sculpted body who got his news from television. She was impatient, brash, and cynical about love. He was excruciatingly shy and stubborn, and put his military service before anything else. In these pages, we relive with Dana the slow unfolding of their love, their decision to become a family, the chilling news that Charles has been deployed to Iraq, and the birth of their son.

In perhaps the most wrenching chapter in the book, Dana recounts her search for answers about Charles’s death. Unsatisfied with the army’s official version of what happened and determined to uncover the truth, she pored over summaries of battalion operations reports and drew on her well-honed reporting skills to interview the men who were with Charles on his last convoy, his commanding officers, and other key individuals. In the end, she arrived at an account of Charles’s death - and his last days in his battalion–that was more difficult to face than the story she had been told, but that affirmed the decency and courage of this warrior and father.

A Journal for Jordan is a tender introduction, a loving good-bye, a reporter's inquiry into her soldier's life and a heartrending reminder of the human cost of war.

About the author

Dana Canedy is a senior editor at the New York Times, where she has been a journalist for twelve years. In 2001, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for "How Race Is Lived in America," a series on race relations in the United States. Raised near Fort Knox, she lives in New York City with her son, Jordan.

A Journal for Jordan by Dana Canedy