"A fellow Marine's description of the exact moment of Gutierrez's death is crushing in its intimacy, both for the emotions of the teller and the excrutiating tale being told" - Los Angeles Times
A few hours after the Iraq war began in March 2003, José Antonio Gutierrez's picture was broadcast all over the world: he was the first American soldier to be killed in the war. A moving and nearly unbelievable story of a one-time street kid from Guatemala who headed north along the Pan-American Highway, ultimately to die an American hero, far from home in a doomed and deadly quest for US citizenship.