Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior

Montgomery J. Granger is a three-time mobilized U.S. Army

Reserve Major (Ret.), who was called into his Reserve Center in

Uniondale (Long Island), New York, on 9/11, in response to the

attacks on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and

Flight 93, which crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania. He answered

his country’s call to duty next in January 2002 for a mission to help

run the military detention facility at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo

Bay, Cuba. He was called up again just six months after

returning from duty at Gitmo, but this time remained stateside at the

U.S. Army Reserve Training Center at Fort Dix, New Jersey. After

nearly six months at Fort Dix, MAJ Granger returned to civilian life

for about a year when he was involuntarily transferred to another

Reserve Army unit that was deploying to Iraq in the fall of 2004.

Major Granger served 14 months of active duty on his third deployment

and served in Baghdad, Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, and Ashraf,

Iraq, as Medical Service officer for military detention facility operations.

He is married and is the father of five children, and lives on

Long Island, New York. He is also the author of “Theodore,” a personal

narrative published in the 2006 Random House wartime anthology

“Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front

in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families,” where he wrote

about his fear and anxiety over having left his family in 2002, and

especially two-day-old Theodore, and what reaction there was upon

his return. Operation Homecoming was sponsored in part by the

National Endowment for the Arts, and edited by Andrew Carroll, editor

of the New York Times bestselling book, War Letters.

Granger was born in Illinois, raised and schooled in Rubidoux,

California, and attended undergraduate school at the University of

Alabama in Tuscaloosa where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree

in education. He earned a master’s degree in curriculum and teaching

from Teachers College—Columbia University, where he met his wife.

He also attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook,

where he earned professional credits to obtain a New York State

School District Administrators’ license. He is an accomplished coach

and teacher of health and physical education, having taught in Alabama,

California, New York City, and Long Island, before becoming a

director of Health, Physical Education and Athletics. He was most

recently Director of Health, Physical Education and Athletics, and

then District Administrator for Operations for the Comsewogue

school district in Port Jefferson Station, N.Y., and is now a Director of

Health, Physical Education and Athletics, and Director of Facilities

for and east end school district in Long Island.

Granger is the author of many writings and musing as yet unpublished,

but hopefully soon to be shared with a waiting world.