Dust to Dust: A Memoir

"I knew very early that I was a solitary being. I longed for the elemental. As a child I was drawn to wilderness, the reckless water of oceans, rivers, and rain, the mountains of stones and sand, and the ruins left vacant by human decline, neglect, and tragedy. War was wilderness, and I went there too." - from the Prologue
Dust to Dust is an extraordinary memoir about ordinary things: life and death, peace and war, the explorations of childhood and revelations of adulthood. Benjamin Busch - a decorated U.S. Marine officer who served two combat tours in Iraq, acclaimed actor on The Wire, and son of celebrated novelist Frederick Busch-has crafted his own 'The Things They Carried' for our time.
In chapters themed around elemental things - water, metal, bone, blood - Busch weaves together a vivid record of a pastoral childhood in rural New York, brutal Marine training in North Carolina and California, and the worst of the war in Iraq, seen firsthand. But this is much more than a war memoir: Busch writes with great poignancy and enormous emotional power about a boyhood spent melting down crayons to form pretend bullets, sinking his own collection of model battleships, and playing soldier in the woods. Most of all, Busch writes movingly about moments of danger and death, real and imagined: in a helicopter, going down; wounded by shrapnel in Ramadi; playing a dead man on television; dealing with the sudden death of friends in combat and of parents back home.
Dust to Dust is an unforgettable meditation on life, death, and how the curious children we were remain alive in us all.