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In late 2003 one fateful morning F. Scott Service received a phone call, a call no soldier is eager to get. As a member of the Army National Guard, he was thunderstruck to abruptly learn that he was being deployed to Iraq and during pre-deployment one question on a simple questionnaire would come to haunt him.

“Are you a Conscientious Objector?”

In an instant of self-revelation, he realized he was.

Now, faced with the terrible dichotomy of his moral opposition to war and an innate sense of duty to serve alongside his fellow soldiers, little did he comprehend the ways in which his tour of duty in Iraq were destined to change him forever. While witnessing the violence of a country ravaged by chaos and facing the disintegration of his life back home, his sojourn in Iraq forced him to fight a new battle, a battle within himself.

What had once been a noble intention became a desperate struggle to salvage what was left of his humanity, an excursion into the darkest recesses of the human mind that ultimately led him to question everything he had come to believe. Pushed to the edge, only then would he discover what lay within.

Why would a Conscientious Objector deliberately choose to go to war and what are the emotional and moral consequences?

What happens when a life that was built is shattered and how is a new self-identity born from the aftermath?

In this unique epistolary novel taken from the handwritten journals he kept in Iraq and marking the ten-year anniversary of his return from the fighting, Scott answers these questions and more. His memoir, Lines in the Sand: An American Soldier’s Personal Journey in Iraq, puts you in the front seat of his roller coaster ride of love, betrayal, courage, fear, despair, and hope and culminates in a remarkable, soul-searching conclusion.