Fred Doucette at U of T Bookstore Reading Series

Fred Doucette, author of Empty Casing: A Soldier’s Memoir of Sarajevo Under Siege (Douglas & McIntyre, 2008), will be at the U of T Bookstore Reading Series at the Robert Gill Theatre, 214 College Street (St. George entrance, 3rd Floor), on Tuesday, February 19th at 7:30 p.m.
This is a free event.

When Canadian soldier Fred Doucette was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a UN peacekeeper in 1995, he had a premonition that this tour of duty would be different. He had been posted to Cyprus in the 1970s and 1980s, but the horrors of the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s were beyond imagining. Doucette takes us to the heart of the conflict as the Bosnian Serb forces launch a massive, concerted assault. Sarajevo, the largely Muslim Bosnian capital, is devastated. Thousands of Sarajevans perish. UN forces, tasked with imposing and maintaining peace between the warring forces, realize this is an impossible task. Upon his return to Canada, Doucette begins his own war with post-traumatic stress disorder. Nightmares and flashbacks plague his days and nights. Traumatized and disoriented, he must learn to face himself, his family and his army once again. With raw emotion, Empty Casing tells the story of the making and unmaking of a soldier, and the growth of a man.