Author’s Biographical Sketch

Mark Stoneman served in the U.S. Army for 20 years, to include two years in Iraq and eight months in Afghanistan. He grew up in England and emigrated to the United States in 1987 after he earned a Rotary Club scholarship to attend college.

He enlisted in the Army in 1994 while he was still a British subject and spent four years basically cleaning things in Georgia and South Korea. Upon becoming naturalized as a U.S. citizen, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and sent to Alaska; so, essentially a wash.

After serving in Iraq in 2005 (which he describes in his book Driving Around, Waiting to Get Blown Up) the Army sent him to Harvard Kennedy School, where he earned a Master of Public Administration degree. The Army, not knowing the meaning of the phrase “good deal,” however, then ordered him to the Pentagon, where for two years they tried to crush his soul and he wondered if there was actually a war going on. At the end of this assignment, he volunteered to return to Iraq as an advisor to the Iraqi army to see for himself (spoiler alert: there was). He has written about this experience in his second book, tentatively titled A Futile Endeavor.

Mark deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, and in 2014, soul suitably crushed, he retired. He subsequently used the GI Bill to attend Johns Hopkins University, where, in 2019, he earned a Master of Arts degree in writing.