John Crawford

SPC John Crawford is an American Iraq War veteran and writer originally from Palatka, Florida known for his 2005 bestselling memoir The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, about his tour in Iraq. In the early 2000s, Crawford, already an Army veteran, had enlisted in the Army National Guard to help pay for his college tuition. Because he already held an associate degree from Tallahassee Community College, he was assigned the rank of Specialist.

In 2002, John Crawford was recently married and close to earning a degree in Anthropology from Florida State University. In 2003, his National Guard unit was deployed to Kuwait and later Iraq during the early stages of the Iraq War. "I was planning to enroll in a master's program at FSU," he says. "Instead I took a vacation to Iraq." Crawford describes his experiences as having created a "new level of accountability," and remarked that when he told his fellow soldiers he was writing a memoir about his experience, all of them "wanted to know if I was writing a 'super liberal' book." as well as C-SPAN and The Daily Show.