November 12, 2003: A suicide attack on the Italian military base in Nasiriyah, Iraq, leaves nineteen dead and scores wounded. Among the survivors is a young, brash Italian filmmaker who had arrived only the day before to scout locations for a film. This is the story of a man who arrived in the midst of the terror, fire, and gunfire of a war that officially didn’t exist … and who came away both permanently changed and more determined than ever to tell what he’d seen with his own eyes. Twenty Cigarettes in Nasiriyah joins other Iraq-war memoirs such as Michael Anthony’s Mass Casualties and Bing West’s No True Glory, but offers a unique perspective: a personal account of how Italy, an ally of the United States in the Iraq War, convinced its citizens to support military intervention in Iraq and put its own personnel at risk. 20 Cigarettes, the 2010 Italian film based upon this book, won eighteen national and international film prizes, including the Controcampo Italiano Award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. “(Twenty Cigarettes in Nasiriyah) is antimilitary, antiwar, ironic, and unconcerned with rhetoric even as it makes clear the “other side” of the story of Italian military presence in Iraq ~ Adelchi Belluco for the Giacomo Matteoti Cultural Association, Rovigo, Italy. “One of the best books about the modern experience of war, from a victim’s perspective, that I have read.” ~ Frank Huyler, MD, author of the essay collection The Blood of Strangers and the novel The Laws of Invisible Things.