In this daring and compelling work of personal memoir, author William Craig Lachowsky details his life story, from birth to now. Expelled from middle school for penning an off-color illustration not long after the Columbine massacre, Lachowsky finds his life forever changed. Faced with a political climate that increasingly frames the white man as Public Enemy Number One, seeking purpose and meaning in his life, he becomes first in his family to enlist in the Marine Corps and eventually get promoted to Sergeant. Lachowsky faces many challenges that should be familiar to the disenfranchised working-class men of his generation-particularly disabled veterans, such as himself-including finding meaningful employment, a place to call home, and a good woman to share his life with.

A born and bred working-class Midwesterner, his story intersects urgently and meaningfully with those of the de-industrialization of middle America, the US's reckoning with Second Amendment rights and gun culture in the wake of mass shootings, the attack on the Twin Towers and the American launch of the so-called "War on Terror," and most of the other major political milestones of the last three decades. Along the way, Lachowsky folds in a searing critique of American imperialism, the dominance of US media and government by liberal elites, the same government's abandonment of American veterans and the working class, and a number of challenging, idiosyncratic takes on race, gender, and power relations that readers are unlikely to have encountered anywhere else. Ultimately, Lachowsky's is a story of persevering against the odds, and it should bolster the spirit of anyone who feels the world is trying to keep them down.