Synopsis
The wartime reflections of a staff sergeant killed in Iraq are memorialized by his father in this harrowing true story.
The Barnes & Noble Review
The best books succeed because they offer the reader a glimpse into a world that might otherwise be unknown, or unknown to most of us. The book at hand, Last Journey: A Father and Son in Wartime, is one of those books. The number of parents who have lost children in the current American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a small, albeit growing, number. The distinction is an awful one, the mark of experience that tears families apart, that leaves a wake of grief, anger, and remorse.
Last Journey is by Darrell Griffin Sr. and Darrell "Skip" Griffin Jr., a self-educated and widely read staff sergeant in the U.S. Army. His areas of interest were philosophy and theology. From his high school years and to the moment of his death, he devoured the giant works of the canon, books by Kierkegaard, Hume, and Nietzsche as well as more esoteric works such as Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotlean Tradition in Islam, by F. E. Peters.