A story of betrayal, honor and sacrifice in the midst of war. Filmmaker Beth Murphy profiled Kirk Wallace Johnson, founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies and an author who visited Steamboat earlier in 2019 as part of the Library Author Series. Johnson served in Iraq with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Baghdad and then Fallujah as the Agency’s first coordinator for reconstruction in the war-torn city. After leading reconstruction teams in Iraq for two years, 26-year-old Johnson returned home to discover that many of his former Iraqi colleagues are being killed, kidnapped or forced into exile by radical militias. Frustrated by a stagnating government bureaucracy that has failed to protect these people, he begins compiling a list of Iraqi allies and helps them find refuge and a new life in America. The List traces the evolution of Johnson's campaign from a one-man crusade into a nationwide grassroots movement.

Skype conversation with Kirk Wallace Johnson after the screening

Kirk W. Johnson is the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, and the author of To Be a Friend is Fatal: the Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind and The Feather Thief. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy, among others. He is a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, and the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Wurlitzer Foundation.  Prior to his work in Iraq, he conducted research on political Islamism as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt.