One bullet away

As he contemplated his career choices, Dartmouth graduate Nathaniel Fick fretted that he had been born too late. “There was no longer a place in the world for a young man who wanted to wear armor and slay dragons,” he writes in “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer.”

Colby Buzzell, who never went to college, had less grandiose dreams. But a series of dead-end jobs, boredom and a desire to make something of his life led him to an Army recruiter’s office. “I figure if I joined the military it might be a quick-fix solution to my problems,” he says in “My War: Killing Time in Iraq.”

Fick, who kept a journal, and Buzzell, who wrote a popular blog, are among a new crop of Iraq war memoirists who are purveying vivid, almost contemporaneous accounts of their battlefield service.

These memoirs, including books by reporters, activated National Guardsmen and a female soldier, evoke the classic tradition of the war memoir as bildungsroman, or novel of education. Combat is seen as a proving ground for character, competence and even masculinity, a way of transitioning from naive adolescence to wise or disillusioned maturity.

But, like memoirs of Vietnam and previous wars, accounts of Operation Iraqi Freedom often contain strains of cynicism and subversiveness, fostered by military incompetence, the difficulty of distinguishing combatants from civilians, and nagging questions about the mission itself.

Chris Ayres’ “War Reporting for Cowards” self-deprecatingly sends up the macho conventions of war reporting, and Kayla Williams’ “Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army” reveals the collateral damage of sexual harassment and mistreatment of detainees. “My War” and John Crawford’s “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq” both evidence a slacker sensibility, even if Crawford is as reluctant a warrior as Buzzell is (initially) gung-ho.

In these memoirs, the weather -- sandstorms, days of 120-degree heat, chilly desert nights -- emerges as a fierce antagonist. War segues into occupation; ennui alternates with danger. Then there is the recurrent figure of the interpreter/fixer: an indispensable friend and ally whose very loyalty puts him at risk.

The prototypical memoirist, writing years after war’s end, is “looking back at his young self,” says Samuel Hynes, Woodrow Wilson professor of literature emeritus at Princeton University and author of the 1997 book “The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War.” “The subject is bound to be, to some extent, the change: the difference between who I was then and who I am now.”

But these new memoirs, published before the political outcome in Iraq is known, are largely untempered by philosophical ruminations, nostalgia or regret. They offer “life as it happens,” Hynes says.

It is that immediacy, says Marjorie Braman, vice president and executive editor of HarperCollins, that will resonate with readers. “The idea that we’re hearing from soldiers themselves almost instantaneously what it’s like” is an important social and political phenomenon, Braman says.

Braman, who edited another blog-inspired memoir, Jason Christopher Hartley’s “Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq,” says she believes the public will respond to these “more personal” accounts of the war despite the growing number of releases.

“I think what people are tired of -- certainly what I grew tired of -- were in-depth, long pieces about politics and policies. These books speak to a certain unrest in the American population” about the progress of the war, she says. “These books are bringing the focus to an intimately personal level, and I think this is where people’s concerns lie now.”

Rites of passage

WAR memoirs generally depict a passage that is literal and metaphorical. Richard Kohn, professor of history and chairman of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says a typical narrative involves “my journey into the world of the military, my descent into the horror of combat, the lessons that I learned, the wisdom that I experienced, the psychological trauma that I faced, the rebuilding of my life afterward, my reflections on this unique experience.”

The genre has developed over the years, reflecting changes in political culture, literary models and war itself. In this country, Kohn says, World War I narratives “tended to be victorious and achievement-oriented,” even as Europe -- which fought longer and saw more devastation -- gave rise to the cynicism of Erich Maria Remarque’s autobiographical novel “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Robert Graves’ memoir “Goodbye to All That,” and the bleak verses of the British soldier-poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

In the mid-20th century, the American perspective darkened. “When you look at war narratives going back to Homer, particularly ‘The Iliad,’ war had some purpose, some meaning, some higher benefit,” Kohn says. “It brought out the emotions -- it did lots of positive things.” By contrast, “war narratives in the aftermath of World War II emphasize the negative, the purposelessness, the way in which the experience of combat destroyed human beings and was corrosive of culture and of basic humanity.”

Vietnam War memoirs became more explicitly political, more confused about who the enemy really was. “Almost without exception,” Hynes says, “they’re violent and bitter and have nothing good to say about the war or the necessity of fighting it.”

Writers such as Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien tested the limits of the memoir form, says Christopher Hamner, assistant professor of history at George Mason University in Virginia. In “The Things They Carried,” for example, O’Brien tells a war story -- then informs the reader, “that’s not exactly how it happened,” Hamner says.

This sort of postmodernist conceit “starts to ask a bigger question,” he says. “How well can you describe something ... that’s so visceral and traumatic? Is even the most truthful memoir getting at the truth about war and how it changes people?”

In “Just Another Soldier,” National Guardsman Hartley voices similar concerns, adopting the literary trope of the unreliable narrator. Disdaining to write what he calls “hero-porn,” he writes: “I’m trying to record events the best I remember them, but it’s not reliable.”

At another point, he invents a romantic back story about an Iraqi ambush victim. Wanting us to trust him and yet warning us not to, he writes: “I’m a madman, a clown prince, a heretic. I am most likely out of my mind.”

Iraq war memoirist Crawford also seems to play with the tensions between memoir and fiction. After an unwanted and seemingly endless sojourn in Iraq, he imagines a happy reunion with his wife and tempts us to believe in it. Then he writes: “It wasn’t till I got back that truth engulfed me like a storm cloud.”

The intensity of combat doesn’t seem to lend itself to simple truths. Recent memoirists like Anthony Swofford (2003’s “Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles”) report “being repulsed by the destruction of war and yet ... attracted by other facets of the experience -- the comradeship, the sheer spectacle,” Hamner says.

This ambivalence is apparent in “One Bullet Away,” which evokes the bildungsroman and epic traditions. With the world at his feet, Flick nevertheless feels he needs “a great adventure, to prove myself, to serve my country.” The book’s narrative follows its protagonist from the familiar challenges of Marine training to Afghanistan and Iraq, including his promotion to captain and leader of men, and then home again.

His reentry to civilian life is accompanied by a new maturity and few regrets. “For me, the intangible honor and pride of being a Marine officer outweighed all the adversity,” Fick writes. Yet, in the end, he declares himself “a reluctant warrior” -- reluctant even to accept accolades.

When he is thanked, he thinks: “Thanks for what? I wanted to ask, shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people’s homes? There wasn’t any pride in being there. The pride was in our good decisions, in the things we did right.”

Differences in tone

FICK’S quiet, measured voice is something of an exception. Buzzell’s profanity-laced narrative of “this dream gone bad” is alternately wide-eyed and cynical. If Buzzell’s school is Iraq, it’s never quite clear what he’s learned. He describes his service as a machine gunner as hellish and surreal in recycled blog entries that once earned him special scrutiny and respect from the Army hierarchy.

But Buzzell, a fan of punk and Hunter S. Thompson, remains fundamentally apolitical. And he feels the customary ties to his fellow soldiers and his mission strongly enough that he ends his book with a promise to once again heed the trumpet’s call.

Williams (whose book is a collaboration with Michael E. Staub) adopts a brash, cocky tone that shocks as it entertains. A military intelligence specialist trained as an Arabic linguist, she depicts free-wheeling, often troubled relations between men and women in the Army that run the gamut from preferential treatment to rape.

Like her fellow memoirists, Williams is torn between her desire to do her duty and anxiety about the context in which she does it. Her enemies are not just sexual harassment, boredom and the frequent incompetence of her colleagues. There’s the fundamental problem in Iraq of distinguishing friends from insurgent foes. “So we make one choice,” she writes. “We come to assume the worst about everyone.”

Still, all the challenges she faces -- including a request to participate in degrading Iraqi detainees -- aid her in “coming into a fuller sense of my own disabilities and strengths,” she writes. After being appointed a team leader, she says, “I was really coming to believe in myself.”

In “War Reporting for Cowards,” Ayres is the antihero of what seems at first to be an anti-bildungsroman. A British financial and Hollywood reporter dragooned by his editor into going to Iraq, Ayres speaks for all those reporters too cowardly to say no. Embedded with the Marines, he portrays himself as a hapless figure in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” -- alternately terrified and relieved at his own survival. “This is not an antiwar book,” he writes in the preface. “I enjoy the guilty thrill of a televised war as much as the next civilian.... This is an anti-sending-me-to-war book.”

And yet, ultimately, he too, experiences the beneficial effects of (cowering during) combat, shedding his hypochondria and chronic anxiety. “Now that I know what war is like,” he writes, “I’ve stopped worrying about death.”

One upcoming memoir captures the effect of war on those left behind: “American Hostage: A Memoir of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq and the Remarkable Battle to Win His Release,” by Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton. Journalists Garen and Carleton are romantic and business partners who travel to Iraq to do a film on the destruction of Sumerian archeological sites by looters.

Carleton leaves early and, shortly after her departure in the summer of 2004, Garen and his interpreter, Amir Doshi, are captured by what turn out to be Shiite extremists. “American Hostage” juxtaposes Garen’s account of his ordeal with Carleton’s as she undertakes increasingly frenetic measures to secure his freedom.

The relationship between Garen and his interpreter -- a sort of Sancho Panza figure -- seems to mirror the complexities of the larger American-Iraqi relationship. Although Doshi is a friend, it’s a friendship rife with cultural misunderstanding. At least twice, Doshi -- as seen by Garen -- commits acts that seem to imperil the reporter. (Doshi’s point of view is left to the imagination.)

An Iraqi sidekick also features prominently in Anthony Shadid’s “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” a book that is part-memoir, part-reportage. Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the Washington Post who speaks fluent Arabic, met Nasir Mehdawi when the Iraqi was assigned to be his government minder. Instead of sticking to Shadid, Mehdawi allowed him to wander off and talk freely to Iraqis.

In time, Mehdawi becomes a trusted friend and colleague, interpreting Iraq -- its customs, if not its language -- for Shadid. Moral ambiguity and irony abound: The very bluster and swagger that endeared Mehdawi to Saddam Hussein’s regime allow him to be effective in the chaos after the regime’s fall. But, finally, he pays the price for helping Shadid. In a twist on the typical war story, the Iraqi is forced to flee his own country, while the expatriate reporter remains behind.