Konrad R.K. Ludwig
Konrad Ludwig enlisted in the United States Army at seventeen — in May 2005, during one of the deadliest months of the Iraq War. His recruiter offered him the Pentagon, medical training, intelligence work. He asked for infantry. Two years later he was a machine gunner with Bull Company, 1st Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, deployed to the streets of Sadr City.
For a year before their deployment to Iraq, Ludwig served as his platoon’s radio technical operator — the longest-serving RTO in the brigade by the time the battle began. The position gave him something most infantry soldiers never have: simultaneous visibility into the tactical ground level and the command layer. He carried company net in one ear and platoon net in the other, sat in on briefings and handoffs, and took an active role in converting leadership objectives into actions on the ground. When he moved back to the line as a machine gunner, he took part in some of the hardest fighting of the war.
Konrad was medically discharged in 2010 following a traumatic brain injury and PTSD diagnosis sustained in combat. He went through the Army and VA mental health systems. What worked was writing. He got on his bike every morning, rode to a coffee shop, and wrote everything down. Four years later the book was done.
Stryker: The Siege of Sadr City has been cited by the RAND Corporation and used as a primary source by the U.S. Army Center of Military History. It was the first public account of the 2008 Battle of Sadr City to reach a significant audience — and when Ludwig posted a Reddit AMA in 2013, it hit the front page and stayed there for three days, as veterans and civilians who had been carrying the silence of that deployment finally found something that named what they had witnessed.
Ludwig is a graduate of Hillsdale College, where he studied Applied Mathematics and Economics. He lives in Michigan.