In 2013, at the height of the Syrian Civil War, Elliot Ackerman traveled to a refugee camp along the Turkish-Syrian border as a correspondent for The Daily Beast to meet with a former member of al-Qaeda, against whom he’d fought as a Marine a decade before in Iraq. That article, along with others, forms the backbone of Ackerman’s memoir-in-essays, Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning, which early reviewers have already hailed as “a profoundly human narrative” and “perhaps the finest writing about the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts that has been published to date.” To mark its publication, we’ve chosen to run an excerpt of the book which first appeared in The Daily Beast five years ago.

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The night before, Abed and I had agreed. When I met Abu Hassar, we’d lie and tell him I’d been a journalist.