RETRIBUTION

Fighting for a cause—and for payback.

Born in Texas in 1991, Reed grew up in California. Joining the Marines after high school, he was chosen to be one of the guards at Camp David and was photographed with President Obama. After the Marines, he worked for a company providing security to State Department personnel overseas. On an online dating site, he met Lina, a Russian woman. They became close; he decided to join her in Moscow and learn the language. One evening, with a group of Lina’s friends, he became drunk and aggressive and was taken to a police station to sober up. He was charged with assaulting the arresting officers. Remanded to custody awaiting trial—at which he was found guilty despite no proof of the crime—Reed began his experience with the Russian penal system. With the help of co-author DeFelice, he describes his ordeal in direct, vivid prose. “Two of the twenty or so guards at the prison were decent, one probably because he was being bribed,” he writes. “The rest were bastards to the nth degree, going out of their way to treat inmates like dirt. The system itself breeds contempt and sadistic behavior.” Reed found that the Russian mafya—career criminals—were the key to surviving prison life, providing contraband, including cell phones and a communications network that kept him in touch with Lina and his parents. Reed refused to cooperate with his jailers and went on hunger strikes. Meanwhile, his parents lobbied the government, and after three years, he was exchanged for a Russian arms dealer. Back home in the U.S., he decided to seek his revenge: He’d go to Ukraine to join the fight against Russia. “The Russians had stolen nearly three years of my life,” he writes. “I was going to make them pay.” What ensues is his quest to do the right thing, no matter the cost.

A powerful memoir, especially for its close-up portrait of life in a gulag.