It’s all there in Fred Minnick’s new book about his experiences in Iraq.

All the unspeakable violence, drama, life-changing horror and loss of war — that almost indescribable tableau really known only to those who have experienced it.

But in the midst of describing conflict and battle, among what can appear to be the mindless insanity of armed conflict — people literally blowing each other to pieces, or trying to — Minnick manages to capture something else.

In Camera Boy: An Army Journalist’s War in Iraq, his just-released and highly personal memoir of his tour in the war zone, Minnick describes the courage and character of fellow soldiers who would become his lifelong friends.

He relates the beauty he found in the eyes of Iraqi children begging for candy; in the companionship found among his fellow warriors — male and female — caught in an often-chaotic crucible of violence.

Minnick also describes the dedication of his unit, perhaps the best group of public affairs writers, photographers, editors and story-tellers in that entire theater of Middle Eastern war, he said. It was a group sent to Iraq to chronicle the Army’s story, to relate back home the efforts of the men and women of the two Stryker Brigade Combat Teams to which Staff Sgt. Fred Minnick was assigned.

The numbers chronicled in Minnick’s book are impressive in their own right. His group completed 650 print, broadcast and “media relations missions.” They helped to broadcast 190 live television interviews with every major American news network, produced dozens of 15-minute news broadcasts and covered, for both the public and their fellow soldiers, some of the Iraq war’s most important events.

Minnick’s story captures all of that. And it includes the sometimes profane and crude nature of military life in war and the relationships that grow into some of life’s best memories from some of life’s worst experiences.

Fred Minnick and his wife, Jaclyn, live in Norton Commons and attend St. Bernadette Church. They were married May 25, 2007, in a Maronite-rite ceremony at St. Louis Bertrand Church. The former Jaclyn Engelsher’s heritage is Lebanese; her husband is from Oklahoma and came here by way of Wisconsin.

After graduating from high school in his hometown of Jones, Okla., Minnick joined the National Guard while he was attending Oklahoma State University. His degree in agricultural communications led him to a public relations job in Milwaukee with Wisconsin’s largest marketing and public relations firm.

But all the while he was in school, Minnick, now 31, was honing his craft as a writer. He wrote and edited copy for the Daily Oklahoman, the state’s largest newspaper. He was a columnist for the Oklahoma State campus newspaper, too — “the kind of columnist you either loved or hated,” he said during an interview at his home.

The book, he’s quick to acknowledge, was written for its personal therapeutic value as well as Minnick’s desire to tell people what his Iraq experience was like, unfiltered by any other media or personality.

“My job was to take pictures of fire fights, car bombs, dead bodies, anything you can imagine that you might see in war,” he said.

That job, as you might expect, changed his life forever.

His experience, his call of duty, left him — and many others — with post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD). And hearing his description of just one of his missions, there’s little wonder why.

He was in Iraq from January of 2004 to February of 2005. He tells of his life-altering moment there matter-of-factly now, though there were times when the words and memories didn’t come easily at all.

“June 24, 2004, is the anniversary for my PTSD,” he said. “That’s the anniversary of the day I was almost killed.

“I was detailed to make photos of four car bombings in Mosul,” he continued. “Insurgents coordinated their attacks on four police stations, and had they been successful, had we not responded properly, it could have changed the way the insurgents fought us.

“I photographed the car bombings, saw the ‘normal’ things you’d see at scenes like that. Blood everywhere. Body parts. Shrapnel and a huge crater. Always at car bombings there would be hundreds of Iraqis watching us, and we always felt we were going to be attacked and shot at.

“Now the thing a lot of people don’t know is that we had American soldiers at those police stations advising the Iraqis. Every time a police station was bombed, or most times anyway, American soldiers were killed, too. So those scenes were always painful for me, and we’d lost a couple of soldiers that day.”

Minnick and his fellow soldiers were moving away from the scene when a Stryker — the mobile but heavily-armed vehicle that lay at the heart of the unit to which he was attached — roared past. Along with others, the Stryker team cordoned off an area around a mosque.

“We were taking heavy fire from the mosque, and it was early in the war when attacking a mosque was taboo,” he explained. “It came over the radio that I was to photo the fire fight, to help document and prove that the insurgents were using mosques as sanctuaries from which they could attack us. This was an opportunity to prove it.”

The battle was intense, he said. A van pulled close to Minnick’s position, and several men poured out of it, one carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.

“He fired it, and it headed right toward me, hit the ground in front of me and bounced over my head,” he said. “It was a dud. If it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t be telling this story right now.”

Minnick faced his problems adjusting to civilian life with the same resolution he and his unit displayed in Iraq. He left the Army on Oct. 5, 2005, found the love of his life in his wife, moved to Louisville and is now writing books and articles for magazines the world over.

He’ll be reading and signing Camera Boy, which was published by Hellgate Press of Ashland, Ore., Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. at Carmichael’s Book Store, 2720 Frankfort Ave. He’ll also have another book signing on Veteran’s Day, at 7 p.m. Nov. 11 at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in the Summit.

“I wanted to tell the story of what we did as best I could, and my therapist said I should get this book out,” he explained. “I can’t enhance the chronic stress of war because there’s no way to describe it. But I believe in our mission there; I don’t want to say my friends died for nothing.”

He also wants to convey the pride he and his friends feel about their service.

“You don’t hear many people saying ‘go and join the service,’ ” he said. “But I’m glad I did, and if I have kids, I’d be so proud if they’d join the Army.”