Reviewing: Steel Will

Steel Will
Staff Sgt (RET) Shilo Harris with Robin Overby Cox


Shilo Harris is one of the many veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have come home with scars from wounds that anyone who comes across them can easily see.  In fact, his scars are hard to avoid.  Harris was riding in a Humvee that was blown up by an IED while he and his men were clearing a road referred to as Metallica.  The blast caused his ears, part of his nose, and some of his fingers to be blown off, and the heat and flames from the ensuing fire burned much of his body.  Due to the nature of these wars, wounds like this are nothing new.  Harris and Cox detail many of them--all horrifying to imagine, but some gut wrenching to endure through Cox's almost too-vivid descriptions--in Steel Will.

What makes Staff Sgt. (RET) Shilo Harris different from many veterans is that he has chosen to talk about his journey.  Steel Will is subtitled "My Journey Through Hell to Become the Man I was Meant to Be."  This is an accurate description for the road he walked--he describes the flames and the heat so intense it caused ammunition in the Humvee to discharge and his uniform to melt into his body--and a figurative one as well.  Harris doesn't shy away from sharing his own growing pains and mistakes as he grew up in the home of a Vietnam vet suffering from undiagnosed and self-medicated PTSD.  He also doesn't shy away from his own selfishness as a young adult and the pain those choices caused for the people around him.  So it's no surprise that he doesn't sugar coat the realities of living through his medically-induced coma as his body struggled to heal, the impact of his new life on his family, his guilt over surviving, the cost of his activism, and his children's desire to protect him from stares while they are together in public.

And, through it all, the missteps, the pain, the hell on earth, the hell in his mind, the suicidal thoughts, Harris credits God with helping him endure.  I expected faith to play a bigger, more active role in the story Harris and Cox lay out in Steel Will.  Instead, it is sort of an underlying theme.  And, true to his willing transparency, the faith often belongs to Harris's wife.  When he doesn't have his own, he draws on hers.  When he can't draw on hers, he humbly draws on his young daughter's.  In the end, the steel will to endure might not belong to Shilo Harris.  It might belong instead to Kathreyn and Elizabeth Harris.

As the daughter of a former National Guard chaplain who survived my father's deployment to Iraq--a deployment that brought home a different father than he brought over--I can recognize that there are no unwounded soldiers.  And there are no unwounded soldiers' families.  Being one of those, this was a hard book to read.  I read portions of it to my husband, and he asked me to stop.  The descriptions turned his stomach.  But you know what?  Those are the costs of freedom.  When we don't have family members or friends or neighbors who serve, it gets easy to debate the merits or horrors of war as theory.  When we read a book like Steel Will we are forced to confront them.  I think that even though it's hard, this is a book well worth reading.  It's worth it to understand just a bit about where our soldiers and their families are and what they endure.  It's also worth it to see that in our own ways, God brings each of us through a hell in order to make us into the people we were meant to be.  And when it gets too hard to endure, He gives us the steel will of the faith of those around us to help us make it.


Disclosure: I received this book free from Baker Books through the Baker Books Bloggers program. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.