Their War, Their Words

Until you’ve driven a humvee on a recon mission wearing nightvision goggles, which is like hitting fastballs with a microscope attached to your forehead, only exponentially harder, because even the slightest mistake, sniper fire or incoming rocket-propelled grenades can kill you and your entire crew; or unless you’ve sweated through 130-degree heat inside a tank, where bottled water sometimes explodes, spraying plastic shrapnel and scalding liquid in your already dripping face; or until skin falls off your feet in sheets because you’ve worn the same combat boots, with the same socks, for 10 days, don’t pretend to know what American soldiers and Marines are going through in Iraq--unless you’re willing to read their stories.

This fall marks a watershed moment in American letters. After spending 30 months and losing more than 1,900 U.S. troops in the war on terror, we’re facing a new canon of battle memoirs written immediately after these troops returned home from Iraq, and in some instances during their actual tours. History and a flock of literary critics would argue that this new crop is a bit premature. Yet each of these books offers raw, unfiltered, “boots in the dirt” accounts of the war--from coping with the adrenaline rush that comes with killing people to the sexual politics of combat zones to the complexities of administering medical aid to wounded Iraqi citizens--absent all of the dispassion and disconnect of a journalist’s or politician’s rendering.

Beyond all the news reports and the president’s “Mission Accomplished” theater, if you really want to know what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, then you should make a beeline to your local bookseller. With the immediacy--and brutal honesty--these memoirs offer, they are changing the way war is being reported, and in doing so have the ability to change the public’s perceptions about this war as it continues. Perhaps we’ll begin to examine the elected officials who are making public policy decisions, but who have never held a gun--only 141 of the 540 members of Congress have ever served in the military--much less the moral burden of pulling the trigger. Perhaps we’ll take a hard look at the faces of troops whose caskets are mostly hidden from sight. Perhaps we won’t surf so quickly past the evening news toward reality TV when more of them die in roadside bombings in Baghdad. Maybe we’ll take their word instead of listening to the pundits and armchair quarterbacks. Maybe. Just maybe.

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“When you’re holding the gun, the responsibility is imminent. it’s right there--all that power is in your hands. Decisions have immediate, irreversible consequences,” says former Marine Capt. Nathaniel Fick, who commanded the 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company, First Recon Battalion in Iraq and is publishing his memoir, “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer,” this month. “There’s also the loss of control. The journalists have the option of raising their hand and saying, ‘I’ve got enough for my story, I’m heading back to Kuwait City.’ And the soldiers and Marines don’t have that option; they’re there for the duration.”

Throughout America’s history, writers such as Fick have braved combat and then put their war experiences down on paper. Whether it was Ulysses S. Grant recounting his battle tactics during the Civil War in his collected memoirs, James Jones detailing the attacks on Pearl Harbor in “From Here to Eternity,” Joseph Heller distilling the ineluctably grim fates of Air Force bombardiers in “Catch-22” or Tim O’Brien cataloging the minutiae of grunt life in Vietnam with “The Things They Carried,” the war story has always marked a signal event in American letters and helped refocus the nation’s attention from the home front to the front lines.

Since March 2003, roughly 425,000 Americans have served in Iraq, and many of them have been on redeployments. This number represents less than one-sixth of 1% of the population of this country. In other words, fewer than half a million troops (and their families) are carrying the burden of 300 million, and in the process combat soldiers have slowly, but quite surely, become an American anomaly. So have their war stories.

“In World War II, there was incredible censorship and control over everything, but the difference was that most Americans knew someone who was serving, and they probably had an intimate relationship with someone who was fighting in it,” says Rolling Stone contributing editor Evan Wright, who chronicled his time as an embedded reporter with Fick and Second Bravo during the initial invasion of Iraq in his bestselling book “Generation Kill.” “Today Americans love to wave the flag and support the military and all that, but they really don’t know anyone who serves, they’ve never met anyone who’s in the military. So I think there’s an intrinsic interest in who these people are, how they see the war and how they describe the military.”

Other than Norman Mailer, who, fresh from stalking Japanese in the South Pacific, wrote and published “The Naked and the Dead” in 1948 at the remarkable age of 25, many of the most enduring war stories have taken time--10, 20, even 30 years--to gestate. For many soldiers and Marines, experiences during combat need time and space to be organized into cohesive narratives or comprehensive histories.

James Jones didn’t revisit World War II’s battle of Guadalcanal in “The Thin Red Line” until 1962. Grant finished his memoirs on his deathbed, some 20 years after Appomattox. It took Kurt Vonnegut a quarter century to tackle his memories of the Dresden bombings during World War II for “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Even Arizona Sen. John McCain, who’s known more as a statesman than an author, didn’t publish his bestselling memoir, “Faith of My Fathers,” recounting his five years in captivity at the Hanoi Hilton, until just before he made his presidential bid. This distance, like a wide-angle lens on one’s brain, allows these combat veterans to glean larger truths about the war experience.

However, our TiVo-subscribing, text-messaging, podcasting culture isn’t willing to wait a decade to hear our warriors’ opinions. McCain, who ignored the solicitations of publishing houses immediately upon his return from Vietnam, sees the advantages of both perspectives: immediate, unfiltered accounts, and those that have marinated over time.

“Most historians would agree that definitive histories are written at a minimum of 20 to 30 years after a conflict is over. But that doesn’t detract from a personal account of an individual’s involvement,” he says. “Firsthand experiences are always helpful in contributing to the knowledge of people who haven’t been there. Probably the greatest book ever written, that had more of an effect than any other in modern history, was ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ because it revealed the true barbarity and futility of World War I.”

Citing as evidence the advent of television news crawls and instant connectivity from the front, McCain sees this fall’s crop of fresh-from-battle books as an evolutionary step, and a sign of the times. “The embedding of reporters was probably a giant leap forward from the days of Ernie Pyle, and a step forward from the generation of reporters that covered the Vietnam War. And now you have the ability for literally every combatant--if they want to--to be, at least in their own way, a historian.”

And so, in handwritten correspondence, e-mails sent back home, personal blogs, books, even in a play such as “The Sand Storm,” written by Hollywood actor-turned-Marine Cpl. Sean Huze, America’s modern warriors are expressing themselves in ways that are influencing people in real time. For better or worse.

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One of the most anticipated books from Iraq war veterans is Fick’s “One Bullet Away.” Blond and blue-eyed, Fick could transition seamlessly from a Marines recruitment poster to a Brooks Bros. ad. He joined the Marines because he wanted an adventure, a “deviation from the trampled path” that was “more transformative” than the Peace Corps. Fick had no intention of writing about the war as he journeyed into it. Yet when he returned from Iraq, he sensed a cultural need to know what was happening over there, and to know it now.

“I can’t go to a family gathering--a wedding, a party--without just getting pumped for information nonstop about what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems like people have a lot of unanswered questions, and it seems like a book that’s written by someone who was there just after the conflict, in its best incarnation, has the ability to answer some of those questions,” Fick says. “Maybe there’s a feedback loop that these stories kind of percolate in and start to change public opinion in some tiny way.”

That sounds a bit grandiose coming from a first-time author, but it’s soon apparent that heady challenges are Fick’s raison d’etre. After 10 hours of meetings this August with Simon & Schuster, which is handling the audio book version of “One Bullet Away,” he maintains an unfettered energy over a too-hot Indian dinner. This effervescence helps explain how Fick went straight from reading Thucydides at Dartmouth to learning “Killology” in Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Va., between his junior and senior years; how he captained Dartmouth’s cycling team to an NCAA championship during his senior year; why he returned home from commanding an infantry platoon in Afghanistan to brave survival school with the Marines’ elite Recon Battalion; how he transitioned from leading 23 men during the spring 2003 invasion of Iraq to studying international security at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, while at the same time writing and publishing his memoirs.

Fick doesn’t want “One Bullet Away” to be “pigeonholed as an Iraq book,” which might prove to be the limiting factor for some of the other warrior tomes out this fall. In many ways, “One Bullet Away” echoes Anthony Swofford’s critically acclaimed 2003 memoir “Jarhead,” which Swofford published 10 years after his tour during the first Gulf War. Both are literary coming-of-age accounts with strong, articulate voices that define the rigors of elite Marine training against the backdrop of a war in Iraq. They both tackle the pratfalls of drill-instructed Marines in the face of real chaos. The only glaring difference between the two is that Fick confronted Republican National Guardsmen, Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen militia and foreign jihadists in roadblock firefights and bridge-based ambushes in one of the largest-scale assaults in U.S. military history, while Swofford’s experience--though brilliantly chronicled--was limited to minor skirmishes in a war that lasted just days.

“There was a cathartic element” to writing his memoir, Fick says. “There were times that I was literally crying at the keyboard, and there were times where writing it helped me get over the experience. And I know I’m not alone in that.” Fick--like 70,000 other Iraq war veterans--struggled with combat stress disorder because of his war experiences, which included seeing two Iraqi boys mowed down by his battalion’s gunfire.

I sized people up on the street, looking head to toe for the telltale bulge of a pistol or a bomb. Not having a tourniquet and IV bag nearby made me vaguely uncomfortable. I ate up every scrap of news about the men still fighting but preferred not to talk about it. I cried sometimes for no reason at all. When a driver cut me off in a merge lane, I visualized, without emotion, pulling his head back and cutting his throat with my car key. On the Fourth of July, a firecracker sent me diving behind a car door, reaching for a pistol that wasn’t there. . . . I thought I was losing my mind.

Unlike other combatants’ accounts, Fick’s experience wasn’t just previously reported in news blurbs. Wright chronicled it at length in three features in Rolling Stone, which as a series won a National Magazine Award for reporting in 2004 and led to Wright’s “Generation Kill,” which is being adapted into an HBO series. One might ask what Fick could possibly add to that level of reportage? In a word: himself.

“A lot of people know more about counterinsurgency and public policy than I do,” Fick says. “But the voices of people like me should be complementary to, not separate from, the voices of these people.” If the response to Wright’s book is any indication of the public’s desire to go beyond the Pentagon press releases and Green Zone reporting, then Fick’s effort may be the next step in this quest for information about the ground situation in Iraq.

“This book is really a bully pulpit--a catalyst for discussion,” Fick says. “I’m going to be on this book tour [stopping at Vroman’s in Pasadena on Oct. 17] while these guys from my unit go back to Iraq. . . . If I’m going to be on this tour while those guys are over there, I’d like it to be about them.”

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If former Army Spc. Colby Buzzell represents anything in this new war canon, it’s the punk rock analog to Nathaniel Fick’s East Coast polish. More than any of these other warrior-scribes, Buzzell’s book, “My War: Killing Time in Iraq,” which comes out this week, arguably is the most feared. Kirkus Reviews had this to say about it: “If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book.” All things considered, Kirkus may have been holding back.

As a self-styled boozing and bingeing skateboard scofflaw from Northern California’s East Bay, Buzzell gravitated toward the Dead Kennedys and Hunter S. Thompson as a teenager while “hanging out on Telegraph Avenue at Berkeley” every weekend at clubs such as 924 Gilman Street, which was “like a West Coast CBGBs.” But the itinerant punk lifestyle began to wear on Buzzell. So while living with his parents and working a string of dead-end jobs in his mid-20s, he decided to be all he could be.

After the Marines refused to take him “as is,” Buzzell walked across the street to the Army recruiter and was soon patrolling the streets of Mosul in tanks with the Army’s Stryker Brigade. Between missions, in stifling, windowless Iraqi-run Internet cafes, beside soldiers who’d sit and check their Hotornot.com ratings, Buzzell reported about his life as an infantryman in a notoriously flippant--and ultimately muzzled--blog called “My War” (www.cbftw.blogspot.com).

To Buzzell, blogs are “like sitting next to a stranger at a bar and he’s telling you a story, and sometimes you got to take it with a grain of salt and choose what you want to believe.” Perhaps this explains why his searingly candid Web postings were watched so closely by his commanding officers. But his blog certainly won’t be the last to go. With punitive actions--fines and demotions--being levied against military bloggers, who now need to register their blogs with the chain of command, many more strange, unfiltered voices are being placed in jeopardy every day.

“I just started writing when I was out there in Iraq at first just to pass the time, and screw around,” says Buzzell, who learned about blogging in an article in Time. “In hindsight, writing was a therapeutic thing for me. I’d go out on a raid, mission or patrol and just sit down and write about it.”

Judging from his grim observations about grunt life--in the book and the blog--you might not want to believe a word Buzzell says. Judging from his jacket photo, why should you? With a tightly shaved head, a milk-curdling stare and two arms full of “tats,” Buzzell looks like a guy with an ax to grind. The fact that he was recently shacking up at the Gershwin Hotel--one of L.A.’s hipster Shangri-Las--only furthers the proposition. But if “My War” was just another antiwar screed, why would his commanding officers sit him down to talk about potential security breaches? Why would his website garner as many as 10,000 hits per day in its prime? Why would a worldwide media pool and countless readers lament the day he pulled the plug?

“The book is one big middle finger to the Army,” concedes Buzzell. “I never really painted the Norman Rockwell, poster-boy image of a soldier in this book. I wrote about me going there.”

For all its faults--lazy repetition of words, grammatical errors and a narrative arc that jumps around like a cardiogram hooked to a man suffering a heart attack--”My War” is just what the subtitle suggests: the story of a young grunt trying to survive boredom and death in a war zone. Once you get beyond the peripatetic rhythms--some chapters are blog entries, some iPod playlists--what you soon realize about this stranger at the bar, Colby Buzzell, is that he can knock you off your barstool at a moment’s notice with soul-jarring observations and darkly comedic insights into what it really means to be fighting and idling in this war.

A dum-dum retard explanation of an OP [Observation Post] is when we go somewhere and hide out and wait for hours for “the bad guys” to show up and do something, if they do something, we’re there to send them to Allah and engage them with everything we’ve got. Sounds pretty cool, huh? Sounds exciting and fun, right? If you want to know what an OP in Iraq is like, here’s what you do: Go put on some boots, long pants, long sleeve T-shirt, some skateboarding knee pads, gloves . . . grab your high school football helmet, and a huge backpack. Not no first day of school backpack either, grab one of those outdoorsy heavy duty ones, like what the European hostel kids carry around. . . . Go to the weight room and throw a forty-five-pound weight in the backpack. No wait a minute, let’s make this accurate, the machine gun I carry weighs 27.6 pounds, I carry about 400-600 rounds of 7.62, that’s like say, twenty-five pounds (it’s probably more than that), the body armor which are two ceramic plates weighs about say, ten pounds each, and you have your pistol, knife, first aid kit, camera, night vision, and whatever crap you need to carry, let’s just say it all comes out to: eighty pounds. . . . Okay, now that you have all that in your backpack and you have your football helmet on, go walk into the sauna. . . . Once you’re in the sauna, crack open a National Geographic magazine and rip out the centerfold of the Third World country landscape that’s inside every issue, and tape it to the wall of the sauna. Now sit there, with all that crap on, and stare at that centerfold photo for two, four, or six hours. Now if you really want to make this realistic, bring a jar full of mosquitoes, flies, and as many different exotic malaria disease-carrying insects and bugs you can find and open up that jar in the sauna and let them loose. This is what an OP in Iraq is like.

Whether he’s channeling Tim O’Brien about the heaviness of battle or Norman Mailer about the absurdity of death-march missions, Buzzell’s prose is the military version of service journalism. Not only does he tell you about driving a Stryker tank on patrol without a wingman, which “goes against everything we were ever taught from day one,” Buzzell puts you in the seat with him, then gives you the instruction manual.

This intense personalization is perhaps the greatest service that these new memoirs have provided. They remove the extended arm of politics from the battlefield and reveal the faces, closer and clearer than ever before.

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The longer we dilute the humanity of battle, the longer we’ll continue to deceive ourselves about its effects. This disconnect between war’s reality and the public mind was never clearer than in the Aug. 29 issue of Time, in which columnist Joe Klein warned against “yellow ribbon patriotism.” In the same issue, the magazine gave a “Critic’s Choice” review of a war video game titled “Call of Duty 2.” (“So intense, you’ll almost wish you’d drawn a desk job Stateside. Almost.”)

We can’t afford that disconnect much longer, and maybe these instant memoirs will help close the gap. Sen. McCain says he has been reading John Crawford’s recently published “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq.” So should the president be reading these books?

“I would hope that every elected official would take time to read at least some of this to have a better appreciation for what they [troops] are going through, particularly in light of the fact that now most people in elected leadership positions have never served in the military,” McCain says. “I think the better the American people are informed, the better their judgment will be.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The boot camp book club

The war on terror has produced works by many soldiers--from Marine snipers and military bloggers to National Guard reservists and Ivy Leaguers. Among the most notable selections:

“Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army,” by Kayla Williams

When President Bush declared there were “no women in combat,” he insulted all the MPs and infantrywomen in Iraq, especially Kayla Williams. With brute force and tough language, this Arabic linguist tackles the problems of sexual politics in a war zone and how they affect women on the front lines. She then points the spotlight on herself--from running patrols to verbally abusing an Iraqi prisoner to falling in love in Iraq--and shows that the majority of women are neither Lynndie England nor Jessica Lynch, but somewhere in between.

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“The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq,” by John Crawford

Whether Crawford is writing about the dark comedy of fighting in a sandstorm or talking to his wife about the domestic front via satellite phone, it’s easy to see why Jon Stewart championed the book during Crawford’s August appearance on “The Daily Show.” Crawford takes a searing look at the stresses and failures that plague a reservist who’s ripped from the comforts of home to patrol the streets of Baghdad for a year.

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“Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq,” by Jason Christopher Hartley

Colby Buzzell is not the only irreverent military blogger with a book out this fall. Hartley, a sergeant who won commendations for his bravery in combat, was in his 13th year of service with the National Guard when his blog was shut down by his higher-ups. But Hartley raised the censorship bar to a new level when he rebooted his blog without the Pentagon’s permission. He was demoted as a result. This is his attempt to set the record straight.

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“Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper,” by Jack Coughlin

A killer’s memoir if there ever was one, Coughlin’s bestselling autobiography is a dark journey through two decades of execution from a distance. The book narrows to a grim focus during Operation Iraqi Freedom, where Coughlin logged more than 30 confirmed kills, 13 in a single day.

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“This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story From the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism,” by Andrew Exum

The first soldier account to come directly out of Operation Anaconda. Exum--a formidable precursor to former Marine Capt. Nathaniel Fick and his memoir--went from the University of Pennsylvania to serving with the U.S. Army Rangers in Afghanistan. Currently studying Arabic at the American University in Beirut, Exum remains a voice on terrorism in the Middle East. He reported on the Beirut bombing in a poignant op-ed for the New York Times last February.--M.S.