Ghosts of War is a first hand account of all of what happened to Ryan Smithson. In this book Smithson tells of life in basic training and then life deployed in combat. He begins his book to a story of him in school. The day is 9/11 and he describes what his feelings as he learns the twin towers were hit(pg 5-6). Hardly in the chapter you as a reader have goose bumps and he goes on and he tells you further about that event and everything that happened that day. Eventually he tells you that is what caused him to enlist in the US military(pg 11). From here on his story is about is a transition from being a civilian to a soldier. He describes the transition in its phases in basic training, and first is the red phase. He describes the hostile environment the drill Sargent create(pg 26-39). During the entire book he has a common theme, "Only after we have been completely destroyed can we begin to find ourselves". This rings true in the eyes of the military because their phases are designed to do that, red phase gets you out of your regular life into military life then the next phase they build you up then the process happens again. During the time he spent deployed he tells of the gruesome experiences he had and a few of his near-death scenarios. He describe the atmosphere there in a hard way to describe, like one of those things you have to be there to understand. But as he tells of his time deployed you discover that everyone was scared, but didn't want to show it, so they buried it with humor. He tells of several stories giving you an example of how they do this. One example is when a Humvee explodes and two men are killed and Ryan's job is to salvage the car and clean it up. As they are working they detect a ham smell and discover it is from human flesh. They avoid the truth that this could have been them by using humor which seems cruel to us but for them it was a protection method(pg 115-122).