It's Christmas, 2003, and Mike Ritz is home on leave from the war in Iraq. He kept his homecoming a surprise and plans on having a fun-filled two-weeks with family and friends, booze and parties. But Mike doesn't come home alone. He quickly finds that he brought the war with him - and, despite his attempts to do so, he can't escape it or what it has done to him. Mike's vacation from the war becomes a hectic gauntlet of friends and family who don't seem to understand what happened to him, memories of Iraq that spring unbidden and unwanted to the forefront of his thoughts, and the brutal realization it wasn't the real world that changed - it was himself. "The Shifting Sands" is a chronicle of Mike's time in Iraq and attempt to return home. It is a brutally honest, unapologetic, look inside the mind of a soldier, written by a soldier.