Iraq veteran recounts his journey with loss, identity and contradictions

Arizona State University alumnus Dylan Park-Pettiford has spent most of his life caught between worlds.

Born in the Bay Area to a Black father and a Korean mother, he learned early how belonging could shift depending on who was asking. At home, his parents filled the air with Coltrane and kimchi, jazz records and Korean news. The house felt like a bridge between cultures. But outside, the world was less forgiving.

“Being biracial showed me two sides of life,” Park-Pettiford said. “But it also meant never fully belonging to either.”

That early fracture became a lens through which he saw everything. He ended up joining the military looking for purpose, and what he found instead were contradictions as deep as the ones inside himself.

Years later, that search for meaning and the long, uneven road that followed brings Park-Pettiford back to Arizona State University, where he will share the story of how war, loss and a lifetime between identities shaped the man he became.

Park-Pettiford will be visiting ASU for the first time in almost 15 years, attending an ASU Book Group event for his memoir, "Roadside," as part of Salute to Service.

For Park-Pettiford, this homecoming is layered. He’s come back not just to read from his new memoir but to retrace the long and uneven road that brought him here.

At 39, Park-Pettiford carries the mix of calm and unease that marks men who have lived several lives. He’s a father and screenwriter now, with several projects in development in the Los Angeles area. There is a quiet gravity that settles in his voice when he talks about the past.

“Coming back to Arizona will feel like closing a circle,” he said. “I first came to ASU right after Iraq, when I was still trying to figure out who I was. I didn’t realize then how much I was still carrying.”

But the journey to this moment began long before the desert, before Hollywood, before the uniform. 

Growing up in what Park-Pettiford called “a very worldly household,” he says his parents raised him without much talk of race, despite their racial differences.

“I didn’t really think about being biracial until we moved to Texas,” he said. “That’s when I started to understand what racism felt like.”

At Black family cookouts, he was the odd one out; among Korean relatives, he couldn’t follow the language.

“That upbringing taught me not to hold prejudice,” he said. “But it also showed me how deeply people can hold onto theirs.”

The complexity of identity would become one of Park-Pettiford’s lifelong themes, and is explored later in his writing, his filmmaking and even his service. 

After high school, Park-Pettiford watched friends funnel into tech startups and dot-com jobs, coding and commuting, and living lives that looked nothing like his. He knew he didn’t want to sit in a cubicle. He wanted to see and experience what the world had to offer.

Then when the 9/11 attacks occurred in 2001, that desire collided with something larger.

“Pat Tillman’s story really hit me,” Park-Pettiford said, referencing the former ASU football star who left the NFL to enlist. “He gave up everything for service. I was young, idealistic. I thought, maybe that’s how I find purpose.”

After attending Tillman’s memorial service in April 2004 at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden near his home, Park-Pettiford walked into an Air Force recruiting office and enlisted. But instead of finding what he was looking for, he found more contradictions.

“The military is America in miniature,” he said. “All its strengths and all its faults.”

He says he experienced some of the worst racism of his life in uniform.

“A lot of guys came from small towns and carried those ideas with them,” he explained. “Sometimes I’d hope being around me might change their prejudices. Other times, it was clear it wouldn’t.”

Still, when the bullets started flying, those divisions blurred.

“In combat, it didn’t matter what color you were,” he said. “You just wanted to stay alive.”

In Iraq, he also met Brahim, a teenage interpreter whose easy humor reminded him of his younger brother, Rory.

“He made me realize how normal people there were,” said Park-Pettiford, who was assigned to the U.S. Air Force Special Operations unit. “They had families, pets, favorite songs. Before deployment, we were fed this cartoon version of Iraq. Meeting Brahim shattered that. It also made me question why we were there at all.”

Those contradictions haunted him: the brotherhood and the bias, the purpose and the destruction. They would become central to his book, which is not only a portrait of war, but of the moral fog that lingers long after.

After leaving the military, Park-Pettiford enrolled in ASU. He majored in film and media studies and graduated in 2011. He said his time here gave him structure, a schedule and a purpose beyond survival.

By the time he left Tempe, Park-Pettiford had direction. For a while, it worked. Then life came apart again.

His younger brother, Rory, was fatally shot outside of a San Jose, California, convenience store in November 2012. It became a defining loss of Park-Pettiford’s life.

“That loss broke me,” he said. “It made me realize that pain doesn’t have to be on a battlefield to be devastating."

“When we were kids, I used to resent having to take him everywhere,” Park-Pettiford admitted. “I wanted independence. After I joined the military, I’d come home to strangers telling me how much my brother would talk about me. That’s when I realized how much he looked up to me.”

“I learned loyalty too late,” Park-Pettiford said, quietly. “That was a hard lesson.”

He also experienced a divorce, homelessness and struggled with alcohol.

Those nights on the street weren’t new. As a teenager, he’d run away to escape abuse at home and learned the geography of public parks by heart. He credits that time for his resilience.

“I’ve slept on park benches before,” he said. “I knew how to survive. But it’s different when you’re supposed to be an adult.”

To keep from breaking further, Park-Pettiford started writing. In Iraq, he kept a journal because he was bored. After he got out of the military, his journal became therapy.

Park-Pettiford filled notebooks with fragments of memories, jokes, nightmares and conversations with ghosts. But as the pages piled up, he noticed a rhythm, a voice and a story taking shape. Not just his, but one a lot of people could relate to.

When a literary agent got hold of a few entries and suggested he turn them into a book, Park-Pettiford resisted. He felt it was too personal and raw.

Eventually, he agreed — not because he wanted to tell his story, but because he thought it might help others tell theirs. The result was “Roadside: My Journey to Iraq and the Long Road Home,” published by Chicago Review Press in June 2025.

The book is an unflinching chronicle of trauma, guilt and the absurdity of war, laced with gallows humor and flashes of tenderness. It’s also a portrait of survival, both literal and emotional. It’s a coming-of-age story, where a lot of the young men around him didn’t live long enough to see their adult years.

“I wanted it to sound like how people actually talk,” he said. “Not like a history book or a lecture. I wanted honesty.”

Readers responded. Veterans reached out, thanking him for saying the things they couldn’t. Civilians found empathy in his descriptions of displacement and loss. His performances for The Moth, a famed storytelling series, drew standing ovations.

“People would come up after and tell me their stories,” he said. “That connection helped more than anything else.”

He credits humor as his most reliable armor.

“The book’s dark, but it’s also funny,” he said. “Because that’s how we survive. If you can laugh, you can live.”

By then, he had moved to Los Angeles to chase a career in film and television. The early years were pure hustle: script work, part-time jobs, rooms rented from strangers. The chaos was somewhat familiar.

“LA’s a lot like the military,” he said. “You’re surrounded by characters, some dangerous, some brilliant. You just try to survive and keep your humor intact.”

He began writing scripts while developing “Roadside,” eventually landing jobs in writers’ rooms, including a spinoff for “Bosch.” But Hollywood, like war, comes with its own contradictions.

“It’s a place where people will use you to get ahead,” Park-Pettiford said. “But it’s also a place where art can heal people.”

He's currently developing a series with playwright and television writer Rick Cleveland (“Six Feet Under” and “The West Wing"), with Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry attached. Another project, a military horror feature film, is being penned for a producer of the hit Netflix series “Black Rabbit.” The work is steady, but it’s not what drives him.

“At this point, success isn’t money or fame,” he says. “It’s being able to tell the stories that matter … and being able to go home and hold my daughter.”

His daughter, Story, is now a year old and carries her own legacy. Her name is a bridge between past and future.

“She’s named partly for Rory and partly for what I do now,” Park-Pettiford said. “Story is what saved me. I’ve never felt more at home.”

That resilience and quiet refusal to quit is what defines him now. It’s the through line from Iraq to ASU, from park benches to film sets.

When asked what he hopes readers take from “Roadside,” he answers without hesitation.

“A glimmer of hope,” he says. “The reunion with Brahim was mine. Even in the worst circumstances, there’s something that helps you survive. It could be humor, faith, friendship, whatever it is. There can always be better days ahead.”

That message resonates especially at ASU’s Salute to Service, where the university honors the varied, complicated experiences of those who serve. For Park-Pettiford, returning here isn’t just a speaking engagement. It’s both a reckoning and a reconciliation.

“I came here after Iraq because I needed structure,” he said. “Now I’m coming back because I finally have one. ASU is where I started figuring out who I was after the military. Coming back here feels like proof that the road actually leads somewhere.”