Elliott Sawyer

ELLIOTT SAWYER was an officer in the 101st Airborne Division. He saw action as a combat patrol leader in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 and during a second deployment in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and an Army Commendation Medal. Now, back in the United States, he commands a training company of up to 240 soldiers. He and his wife live in Elgin, Oklahoma. THE SEVERANCE is his first novel. Sawyer’s first combat tour, in Iraq, included heavy fighting in Al Dora, a marketplace south of Baghdad on the south bank of the Tigris River. It is astride the fault line between the Sunni and Shia populations and their then-warring militias and insurgent factions. He experienced more than ten IED (improvised explosive device) strikes there and numerous ambushes and other attacks as his platoon went on raids, fought insurgents and carried out other missions. In Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009, he was a Field Artillery platoon leader and a fire direction officer at Firebase Shkin, a cluster of mud buildings located about four miles from the Pakistan border at an elevation of 7,800 feet. He and the more than 40 soldiers under his command provided artillery support from their 105mm howitzers for Special Operations forces. They were bombarded by enemy rockets daily, sometimes hourly. Later, Sawyer led another platoon assigned a dual mission: protecting the colonel who commanded their battalion, and also acting as the Quick Reaction Force to any unit in need of reinforcement in their area—which was often Sawyer was born and grew up in Virginia, south of Richmond, and received a B.A. in History from Radford University, Radford, Virginia