Postcards From the Front

In Jarhead, his memoir of the first Gulf War, Anthony Swofford writes, “[T]he men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading the bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom.”

The news–bad or otherwise–contained in the recent flurry of soldier memoirs about this Iraq war is especially significant at a time when G. I. Joe has become the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy in the battle to define the truth about the war.

In media interviews and public appearances, the authors and military bloggers are asked the same questions: Can we win this war? Did the Bush administration have a post-invasion plan? Was the situation in Iraq worth going to war over? And, inevitably, should we just get the hell out?

But those who fight do not necessarily offer a higher truth about Iraq–or at least the kind that will help answer these difficult questions. The reality portrayed in these memoirs is personal and, for the most part, self-confessedly unreliable. As one memoirist, Jason Christopher Hartley, warns his readers, “If you want news about Iraq, congratulations, you’ve come to the wrong fucking place!”

Rebels without a clue

Unlike previous generations of soldiers, these authors–with the exception of one–have little interest in pondering the “big picture.” The “truth” they offer about the war and its effects is incomplete, episodic and usually delivered in a tone borrowed from Animal House.

Colby Buzzell (My War: Killing Time in Iraq), Hartley (Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq), and John Crawford (The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq) express the same adolescent contempt for authority. These rebels without a cause show no aspiration to be much else, even in the midst of combat. The result: a lot of unadorned, profanity-laced honesty but not much truth-telling.

Buzzell joins the military to escape a life of dead-end jobs, skateboarding and way too many drugs. A veteran in a bar makes the Marines sound like “joining a party frat with weapons that gave out paychecks,” and he’s sold, though he ends up in the infantry.

Strikingly self-absorbed and referencing movies non-stop, Buzzell seems to experience the war as a Hollywood flick in which he is the star. On combat missions, he listens to an iPod playlist named “My War,” with songs more likely chosen for their titles than their politics: “Kill ‘Em All,” Metallica; “Bombs over Baghdad,” Outkast; “Killing an Arab,” The Cure.

The war, in Buzzell’s book, appears as an extreme adventure tour, with his fellow soldiers as likely to whip out digital cameras as weapons. A mission to capture a top general of the Fedayeen almost goes awry when a camera flash goes off just before the raid begins. Readers looking for tales of heroism will instead find Buzzell’s gleeful account of how six guys in his company came under mortar attack on base while playing night volleyball under “bright as fuck” lights. Their minor shrapnel wounds earned each a Purple Heart.

National Guardsman John Crawford’s achievements include stealing a motorcycle from a hapless local, and shouting Christmas greetings at his “captive Muslim audience” at a traffic checkpoint because it was “entertaining to annoy them.”

Such cheerful irreverence in a war zone can oftentimes be read as callous indifference. Hartley describes standing guard on detainees arrested in various predawn raids, a duty that includes taking the “big rascals pee pee.” Soon, one of the “problem children” refuses to keep a blindfold on because of allergies that hurt his eyes. The situation escalates and Hartley loses it:

I put dickhead on his knees in the middle of his cell, removed the blindfold he was now wearing as a dashing olive-drab scarf, and wrapped the top of his head with about ten layers of hundred-mph tape. … Our S-2 (intel) master sergeant, a mean-spirited quasi-sadist, the full-time El Capitan of the jail … kept saying, “Okay Sergeant, that’s enough tape. Okay, that’s enough.”

Hartley relents after a tearful apology from the prisoner. He owns up to feeling “stupid, petty and cowardly,” but gives no indication that he learned anything from the episode.

The slacker memoirs are often funny and sometimes insightful. For the most part, these are decent guys who loathe the bloodlust and common military incompetence that destroy so many lives. Their perspective, however, is blinkered by their need to stay in “character,” i.e., the smart-ass who refuses to take anything seriously, including the casualties of war. Even Hartley, who is more clued-in than his compatriots, can only express his unhappiness at the lopsided body count–“a near 1:3 ratio of dead evildoers to innocent and ridiculously poor Iraqis”–with flippancy: “It’s like we should have bumper stickers that read, ‘I [HEART] DEAD CIVILIANS.’”

This “whatever, dude” detachment adds to the tunnel vision created by a war zone where the enemy is entirely unknown and rarely seen. Guys like Buzzell emerge from well-fortified operating bases to execute quick combat missions that largely consist of unleashing massive firepower on shadowy fighters, glimpsed intermittently between rounds. The rest of the time he works out, listens to music and watches movies. Such are the perks of fighting for a superpower.

Cardboard foes

In a combat zone marked by a vast cultural and linguistic divide between the soldiers and the Iraqis, “truth” depends on who is doing the telling. Hartley and Buzzell describe late-night raids as decisive operations where soldiers show up, storm through the front door, apprehend the “target individual,” search the house for weapons and head out. “Badda bing, badda boom,” writes Buzzell. Wailing women and kids warrant a mention–at times a pang of guilt–but remain in the background.

But when the Iraqi blogger Riverbend witnesses one such raid, it’s the woman’s humiliation that dominates the description:

“I couldn’t see her face because her head was bent and her hair fell down around it. It was the first time I had seen her hair … under normal circumstances, she wore a hijab. That moment I wanted to cry … to scream … to throw something at the chaos down the street. I could feel Reem’s humiliation as she stood there, head hanging with shame–exposed to the world, in the middle of the night.”

The authors of these memoirs know that Iraqis have a less flattering opinion of such actions, but they often seem too self-absorbed to care. Failing to “see” the Iraqis as people, the authors depict them as rote “Third World” types: good-hearted peasants; menacing mobs of angry locals; shy, sweet women and children; rascally street urchins; trusty shopkeepers or guides; and, of course, the “bad guys.”