High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Michael Yon (born 1964) is an American writer and photographer. He served in the Special Forces in the early-1980s, and he became a general freelance writer in the mid-1990s. He focused on military writing after the invasion of Iraq. Yon has been embedded on numerous occasions with American and British troops in Iraq, most prominently a deployment with the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment (Deuce Four) of the 25th Infantry Division in Mosul, Iraq that ended in September 2005.