American Mourning: The Intimate Story of Two Families Joined by War—Torn by Beliefs

American Mourning is the story of two American families whose sons died in the war on terror. Casey Sheehan and Justin Johnson had been best friends since they first met at Fort Hood in Texas; they were killed within five days of each other in separate ambushes in Sadr City, Iraq, during Holy Week of 2004. As the Sheehan and Johnson families have mourned their unimaginable loss, they have had little else in common and have taken entirely different paths as they mourned. Justin’s father, Joe Johnson, followed his son to Baghdad, slogging through the open sewers of Iraqi slums to see where Justin had died and to avenge his death. Cindy Sheehan wanted another kind of revenge. Blaming President Bush for Casey’s death, she called the Muslim radicals who killed her son “freedom fighters” and brought an entourage of antiwar activists and a coalition of the willing press to the president’s ranch outside Crawford, Texas. Demanding that the president meet with her in the sweltering Texas summe