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xxi Editor’s Acknowledgments First I would like to express my debt and gratitude to those who helped restore to life Ida Donges Staudt’s fifty-five-year-old typescript: Elwood and Irene Staudt. They safeguarded their aunt-in-law’s memoir and, years later, preserved it at the archives of The Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society, located at Lancaster Theological Seminary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I thank them also for providing me with the pictures of the Staudts that appear in this memoir. I am grateful to the director of The Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society, Dr. Richard R. Berg, for bringing the Staudt transcript to my attention soon after it was acquired; it gave me the opportunity to pay back to the author and her husband—well known in Baghdad as “Dr. and Mrs. Staudt”—some of the debt that I owe them. At the Lancaster Theological Seminary, its associate librarian, Mr. Chris Belden, has kindly scanned the original typescript onto the computer , greatly facilitating my work. Dr. Christina Ravert, school psychologist for Manheim Township School District, has efficiently and patiently attended to the numerous details involved in the preparation of this chronicle, especially its electronic version. Dr. Louis L. Athey, Charles A. Dana Emeritus Professor of History, has read the foreword and offered me detailed comments on it, akin to the judicious advice that I have received from him throughout our years together as colleagues and friends at Franklin and Marshall College. I am grateful to Mr. Paul Rascoe, Government Documents, Maps, and Electronic Information Services librarian of University of Texas Libraries, who cordially and promptly provided me with the digital map of Iraq that I have used here. xxii • Editor’s Acknowledgments Closer to home, my special thanks to my wife, Betty, for her patience and support, now and through the years. More than once she has read this text as it passed through its various stages, sharing her generally sound observations with me. My daughter Deena I thank for her forthright comments on my introductory piece. My son Larry has clarified for me a number of legal intricacies issued by Syracuse University Press. For whatever flaws that the reader may yet detect in this book, I am, unquestionably, the responsible one. ...

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