In the Middle of the Forever War

Reviews
April 20, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 18 4 min read

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The enemy knew he could not defeat us on our own terms. The conventional battlefield was ours, the sky as well. So they made us bleed one body at a time — limb by limb — through the use of handmade bombs. If there is one tribe of the military that knows this tactic best, it is the explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians charged with combatting it. Brian Castner spent eight years leading EOD teams, including two tours in Iraq. The harrowing aftermath of that period of his life was well-told in his memoir The Long Walk; his latest work of nonfiction, All the Ways We Kill and Die, continues the memoir’s narrative while displaying Castner’s considerable talent for both in-depth reportage and more imaginative forms.

coverCastner opens the book with a prologue that imagines the detonation of an IED in Afghanistan from the Taliban perspective — a detonation, we learn a few pages later, that takes the life of his friend and EOD comrade Matt Schwartz. Castner, five years out of uniform and now a writer and freelance journalist, asks the question the book seeks to answer: “Who killed Matt Schwartz?” From there, the narrative loops in ever-widening arcs through a structure that roughly mirrors an EOD team’s post-blast actions. Collect the dead. Tend the wounded. Gather evidence. Hunt. Remember.

If there is risk inherent to the structure of All the Ways We Kill and Die, it is that its polygamous marriage of imagination, memoir, and reportage runs the risk of throwing off a genre-monogamous reader. There’s as much for the armchair military history buff in Castner’s exploration of IED technology and tactics as there is for fans of literary nonfiction. The early chapters are fairly traditional narratives, Castner retracing the impacts of personal losses ranging from his dead friend to maimed comrades. But by Part III of the book, Castner must link disparate narratives from both Iraq and Afghanistan while keeping an eye on how he imagines a kind of IED archetype, this “Engineer” he suspects took Matt Schwartz’s life. The surreal rhythms of a drone pilot, a firefight documented through passages of military Internet relay chat — these are the disorienting signs of a disappearing center, as Part IV reveals how we hunt and kill.

covercovercoverThe book is not a cut-and-dried war story; its conclusion is appropriately ambiguous considering the open-ended nature of the wars my generation has fought. Novels and memoirs by service members that address their time in Afghanistan or Iraq have not benefitted from the sense of closure granted veteran writers of World War Two, or even Vietnam. Where writers like Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Eugene Sledge (With the Old Breed), Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato) and Phil Caputo (A Rumour of War) could look back at the U.S.S. Missouri and the Fall of Saigon with respective clarity; novelists Matt Gallagher (Iraq, Youngblood) and Elliot Ackerman (Afghanistan, Green on Blue) need only peruse the Internet for unnecessary reminders that both wars drag on today. Memoirists have fared similarly. Both Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country and even Castner’s The Long Walk could only conclude by narrowing the lens to a hyper-personal focus. A former soldier lies in bed. A former EOD officer performs therapeutic yoga. There is no definitive ending when the events that shaped your story are still unfolding.

cover“Long and Messy and Gray” is the book’s narrative climax, and details the lifeline of an EOD troop turned lethal contractor whose name Castner redacts to “M_____.” Highly fragmented, but crafted so as not to bewilder, its nearest cousin is that brilliant piece of Vietnam writing, “Illumination Rounds” from Michael Herr’s Dispatches. And it is the perfect final lift to a bracing narrative. George Packer noted in his New Yorker essay “Home Fires” that “fragments are perhaps the most honest literary form available to writers who fought so recently.” I contest the efficacy of a word like “honest” in this context; had Packer applied the word “effective,” the statement would prove more meaningful. “Long and Messy and Gray” might watershed the most effective personal war narrative structure I’ve encountered; the denouement that comes in Part V is necessary, but it’s this chapter that is most compelling.

All investigations, war-related or not, begin with a simple question and best of intent. But as Serial showed us last year, building a complete picture is about sorting through the puzzle pieces and assembling the mosaic as the meaning of each fragment appears. If, like M____, one returns to war dozens of times, the narrative must necessarily shatter each time. Within this frame, Castner shares the same creative space as Serial’s producer, Sarah Koenig. Certain pieces belong together, neatly assembled for the reader to observe. Other pieces, however, belong in a pile, appearing as they are overturned. There’s an art to this type of transient work, a sense of structural mastery just beyond the page that is all the more inspiring when you consider that both Castner and Koenig began with just one question: “Who?” The best writers fully admit that the best stories reveal themselves along the way. The best stories, as it turns out, might end up answering a different question altogether.

“Who killed Matt Schwartz” is the least of the questions answered within the pages of All the Ways We Kill and Die. Castner captures the complex push and pull; the cost and reward; and a fully formed image of what it’s been like to be both in the middle, and on the periphery, of The Forever War. Despite this wide lens, however, Castner’s real task is to tell an intensely personal story. In the closing chapter, we find him walking the forest with his children, pointing out roots, ruts, and creeping vines that threaten their peaceful stroll. I imagine him pausing, pushing a knee into the rich brown earth and pointing ahead once more: danger there.

is a graduate of the University of Alaska MFA in Creative Writing, the recipient of a 2017 Alaska Literary Award, and the creative director for the state's only veteran-civilian writing workshop, Danger Close Alaska. This essay represents neither official policy nor position, and for more of that, visit his website: matthewkomatsu.com.

Quick Hits Reviews

Making Strange: On Laura Vapnyar’s ‘Still Here’

Quick Hits Reviews
August 4, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 3 min read

In Russian, the term ostranyeniye means “the act of making strange.” In the early twentieth century, the idea was coined and used by Russian Formalists, authors and artists, who sought to make the familiar seem foreign — to make those who consumed their art question everyday words and forms.

Still Here, the third novel by Moscow-born Lara Vapnyar, bears very little resemblance to any of the experimental works by those Russian Formalists. But though her book may have more in common with the works of Jane Austen or Claire Messud, her satire is its own form of ostraneniye, as it successfully points out that the essential strangeness of what are now some of the most common elements of American life.

Still Here is the story of four Russian immigrants in New York City. There’s Vadik, certain only of what he doesn’t want; Regina, a formerly famous translator who has married a wealthy American man; Vica, stuck in Staten Island with her son and husband but certain she’s “pure Manhattan”; and Sergey, Vica’s husband, a former prodigy who dreams of developing an app — “Virtual Grave” — that allows people to communicate with the dead by preserving and recycling what they said online in life. Virtual Grave is Sergey’s final chance to prove himself the brilliant man he was always expected to become. Given his difficulty holding down a job, it’s a last shot at providing for his family — and so a point of tension in his already troubled marriage with Vica. The characters’ respective stories unfold and intersect as they, as a group, try to come to terms with death in a way that enriches life.

Vapnyar is not the first to use something like Virtual Grave in art. A short story in Adam Johnson’s excellent collection Fortune Smiles centered around a very similar concept, as did an episode of the hit television show Black Mirror. What makes Vapnyar’s book unique is neither the idea of the app nor the use of four friends trying to make it in New York City (Vica is obviously the Carrie Bradshaw of the bunch), but rather how these elements — a slightly forward-looking app and the perspective of four very different immigrants — are used together to “make strange” the modern world. There’s always someone having more fun on Facebook; always a better match out there on Tinder or OkCupid (in the book, the app is “Hello, Love!”); always someone wittier on Twitter. Except that, of course, there isn’t.

The book, like each of Vapnyar’s key players, is not without its faults. It’s a fresh take on an old theme, but it is nevertheless an old theme, and one that uses some old tropes—about New York City, about immigrants, about social media, etc. And there are points at which it feels more beach-read than smart satire. Of Regina, Vapnyar writes, “Being an introvert, she had trouble making friends.” It is the sort of sentence at which she herself might smirk elsewhere in the book.

Such shortcomings aside, Vapnyar ultimately offers a literary representation of the way we live now. She shows us America, the beautiful and absurd, managing to satirize it without ever losing sympathy for the people living in it, and certainly not for her four main characters. At one point, Regina, sure that today is the day she’ll start reading and writing again, puts off work to watch television; with the help of an app called “Eat’N’Watch,” which recommends the right food-show binge combination, she wastes hours and winds up disgusted with herself. In another moment, Vadik recalls the one-night-stand he had in New York City, who he left the next morning and who, he later realizes, he may have loved. The morning after, Vadik remembers that he had left his copy Hell Is Other People at the diner where he met the woman: “He had no idea where that diner was. He would never be able to find it again. He would never be able to go back there. Vadik felt a surge of panic and regret, so bad that it made his heart ache.”

The book gives us plenty on which to reflect. Would we want an app like Virtual Grave? What would it mean to control our own online presence after we’re dead? If we aren’t exactly living in the book’s universe of constant app updates and addiction, how far removed are we? It makes strange the world we think we know. But even within that — in the bounds and bonds of satire and reflection and ostraneniye — it manages to remind us of the humanity that existed before there was an app for that. One that will remain, we can hope, once we’ve moved on.

Quick Hits Reviews
| 10 books mentioned 3 min read
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Reviews

Thinking Again: Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books

Reviews
March 13, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 9 6 min read

Marilynne Robinson’s latest collection of essays rehashes a lot of old positions. There’s the polemic against reductionism — “There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell” — and the arguments against rational-choice economic theory and its assumption that humans are one-hundred-percent self-interested.  Calvinism still needs defending, the Abolitionists were truly heroic, public discourse has been “dumbed down,” the New Atheists get religion all wrong, and the ghost of Sigmund Freud won’t go away. There’s also a pretty serious lack of humor throughout, which is too bad because Robinson can be funny in a folksy kind of way. It’s not that her interests aren’t compelling; it’s that if you’re really familiar with her nonfiction, especially The Death of Adam stuff, you might grow slightly impatient with all this thematic repetition, despite the fact that the prose is consistently gorgeous.

Thankfully, that’s not everything. The latest turn in Robinson’s thinking is toward politics, specifically her strong intuition of political crisis in America. She’s talked politics before, but it’s never been quite this intense or urgent. The Tea Party is isolated as a particularly menacing development — she sneeringly calls them “these patriots” — but the crisis goes considerably beyond them, to the bedrock of American values.  “Loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing,” she writes. “We are now losing the ethos that has sustained what is most to be valued in our civilization.” Whether you buy ambiguous intuitions like these, and there are probably decent empirical grounds for doing so, like the abysmally low percentage of Americans who actually trust Congress, the point is that Robinson intends for her book to respond to what she believes is the depressed spiritual state of the union. This isn’t anything new. Walt Whitman talks about all kinds of American terribleness in Democratic Vistas, which Robinson quotes from in the introduction. In this collection she wants to do roughly the same thing as Whitman did in Vistas, to respond to this American moment with a mixture of criticism and hope in a prophetic-sounding voice.

Besides the essays’ tone, which is consistently heartfelt, moving from grave (“We do not deal with one another as soul to soul..”) to joyful (“I love the writers of my thousand books.”), her political concerns give the book a kind of informal unity. “Austerity as Ideology” is a good example of the kind of political thinking Robinson does, combining an eccentric mix of discourses — cosmology, Cold War history, autobiography — to approach a Major Topic from an Oblique Angle. Here the Major Topic is the politics of Austerity (her caps) that emerged after the ’08 financial collapse and the Oblique Angle is starting the essay with the planet Mercury’s “innumerable scars of eons of local cataclysm.” It’s neat how she circles toward her subject from a distance, literally from outer space; the cosmic scope can be exhilarating. Even if you don’t agree with her arguments, it’s fun to watch her leap between discourses, finding intuitive linkages between them. One of her virtues as an essayist is her sensitivity to the emotional texture of ideas. Another is her knowledge of how ideas can surprise you and suggest new ones when juxtaposed in original ways. The Austerity essay criticizes the reductionism of ideological thinking and the culture of fear and anxiety that makes Austerity possible. Hopefully you’ll hear some echoes of Robinson’s calm, historically-informed voice in a debate that will likely play into the 2012 Presidential election.

Robinson’s politics are tough to classify. They’re obviously on the spectrum of liberalism, but from what I can tell they seem closest to a species of communitarianism that the term “civic humanism” describes pretty well. The entry in Stanford’s online Encyclopedia of Philosophy says civic humanism is opposed to “acquisitive individualism” and it’s a stance that says the purpose of society is the “realization of human potentiality, encouraging the flowering of all forms of creativity and ingenuity insofar as they contribute to public welfare.” This jives with Robinson’s critique of the self-interestedness of neoliberal economics and her concerns about civic virtue and public responsibility. It also helps explain the most persistent political theme in the book: education. Two of the essays, “Freedom of Thought” and “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” celebrate education from an autobiographical perspective, and in other ones like “The Human Spirit and the Good Society” education is being undermined by cultural forces like anti-intellectualism. Robinson holds on to the humanist faith in the liberating powers of education, and the essays do a lot of worrying about the fate of public education once that faith disappears.

As probably anyone who read Gilead figured out, Robinson is a Christian, but she’s the kind of Christian most non-Christians are comfortable with, not the dogmatic Evangelical or TBN-style Prosperity Gospeller, but the liberal Protestant type. She’s a part of a tradition that’s okay with mystery and uncertainty, that encourages a spirituality of process and exploration, a faith that she calls in her “Credo” “a liberation of thought.” It’s also a tradition that values the Bible, without a doubt the most important book to Robinson, and two of the essays take up Bible-related issues almost exclusively. “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism,” delves back into the Reformed tradition and Biblical scholarship of The Death of Adam and the history of law of Mother Country to make the contrarian point that the origins of American liberalism’s ethos of social justice is more indebted to the Hebrew Bible or Old rather than New Testament. Instead of the O.T.’s “warlike God of Israel,” Robinson looks to the sunny side of Deuteronomy and finds liberalism, “an ethics of non-judgmental, nonexclusive generosity.” The bigger point Robinson makes is about the Christian attitude of disparagement toward the O.T. In the other Moses essay, “The Fate of Ideas: Moses,” which contains some of the best rhetorical take-downs in the book and brings out Robinson’s ironical side, she finds this same attitude of O.T. disparagement in recent biblical scholarship. “The Old Testament certainly is not ours to misrepresent, since in doing so we slander the culture we took it from, an old and very evil habit among us.”

That quote’s “ours,” “us,” and “we” really begs the question of audience. After some light Googling, I found that most of the essays were originally talks or lectures. It would have been helpful to know the makeup of the audiences she addressed, since some of the essays like the Moses ones seem explicitly addressed to a Christian audience, concerned as they are with debates internal to that community. There are lines like, “To speak in the terms that are familiar to us all, there was a moment in which Jesus, as a man, a physical presence, left that supper at Emmaus.” Is the supper at Emmaus “familiar to us all”?  I’m just not sure how many people buying books of pop-style intellectual history, from a publisher like FSG, will know about that.  The introduction would have been a good place to tell us about the rhetorical situation of the essays so as to make those “we’s” and “us’s” less confusing.

My other big criticism is an overall sense I get that Robinson’s intellectual and political interests end in the 1960s, right around the time she left Sandpoint, ID for Pembroke College, RI. Other than a brief reference to Vattimo in Absence of Mind, she’s refused to deal with one of the most influential intellectual developments since the 1960s, the emergence of Theory. It’s like she’s not aware of how much the part of the academy she cares about most, the humanities, have absorbed the assumptions and attitudes of thinkers like Foucault. She’s still hand-wringing over Nietzsche’s superman, Freud’s primal horde, and Skinner’s behaviorism. Politically, Robinson’s liberalism looks to the past rather than the present. For her, the paradigmatic liberals were the Abolitionists who had a religious vision for social justice. But she seems reluctant to acknowledge that the torch of social justice has long since passed to secular hands, and the major progressive achievements of the last thirty years, feminism and gay rights, were couched in secular rhetoric. There’s also the sense with Robinson that all good things come from New England, that every major U.S. achievement, artistically, intellectually, politically, religiously, is traceable back to Puritan origins, and ultimately back to the fountainhead of John Calvin. Her privileging of New England origins was once fashionable back with scholars like Perry Miller whose heyday was roughly around the same time of Robinson’s undergrad days. I really don’t care that she takes these positions — in fact, they account for a lot of her strangeness and originality — but her thinking would benefit from a dialogue with some of the recent shifts in the humanities, and her politics would benefit from a deeper recognition that good things can have secular sources.

The risk of her essays is that they might come off as culturally irrelevant or out-of-touch or, worse, conservative. She includes almost zero references to TV, movies, Facebook, celebs, or anything to do with pop culture. Her lonesome distance from the mainstream is eccentric, but it’s also what gives her essays their strange power to diagnose America’s discontents. It’s a perspective that’s simultaneously alienated and engaged, public and personal  For anyone familiar with her nonfiction, her positions are by now familiar: her defense of public education, her sense of the irreducible mystery of existence, her reverent attitude toward history, her questioning of the assumption that we are absolutely self-interested. But I don’t mind the repetition, because if any of her thought somehow seeped out into America I think we’d be much better off for it.

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| 10 books mentioned 9 6 min read
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Reviews

A Different Kind of Iraq Novel: ‘War Porn’

Reviews
August 10, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 5 min read

“An Army Newspaper” is a story by the Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim, published in the collection The Corpse Exhibition. The narrator details his time editing the cultural section of a military newspaper, presenting his readers with stories and poems celebrating the glories of war and the bravery of the nation’s soldiers. (The war in question is presumably the Iran-Iraq war that went on for almost the entire length of the 1980s, crippling Iraqi society, though the narrator neglects to give any specifics as to the nature of the conflict.) The content of the narrator’s newspaper section is rather lacking in literary quality, as it is written by soldiers who want only to valorize their nation and its leaders rather than speak truthfully about their own experiences. But the editor manages to make his section readable by adding his own rhetorical flourishes to the soldiers’ drab, dutiful prose. His superiors praise his work, stoking his dream of becoming Minister of Culture.

One day, a packet arrives on his desk. It contains five stories, all by the same author, written in school notebooks. Unlike the usual fare that comes his way, these stories are astonishing. “The stories were written in a surprisingly elevated style,” he says. “In fact, I swear that the world’s finest novels, before these stories that I read, were mere drivel, vacuous stories eclipsed by the grandeur of what this soldier had written.” The editor looks into this soldier’s background and finds he was recently killed shortly after sending in the stories. He takes advantage of this unique opportunity, publishing the soldier’s work under his own name. The editor is soon the toast of the literary world, attending conferences and giving interviews. The stories, however, keep coming.

Day after day, packets land on the editor’s desk, all of them containing more of the soldier’s brilliant work in the same school notebooks. Did he survive? The editor digs up the soldier’s grave and finds that he is quite dead, a single bullet wound, the handiwork of a sniper, in the center of his forehead. Just to be safe, the editor burns the body. But the stories don’t cease. Dozens of packets containing hundreds of brilliant new stories arrive daily. The editor burns these as well, purchasing an incinerator for this express purpose, but still they pile up, leaving him with only one option.

I found this story to be, as they say, relatable. I’ve been following the growing body of literature on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for a few years now, and it certainly feels as if there are endless manuscripts landing on my desk every day, demanding my attention, driving me to consider unorthodox methods of disposal. They’re not all deathless works of brilliance, for sure, but they are, more often than not, urgent and impassioned, writers trying to come to grips with their experiences of war, whether they’re veterans offering firsthand accounts or civilians making meaning from what they’ve seen and read. The lapses into sentimentality and cliché seem the result of haste more than dishonesty.

Roy Scranton is also familiar with the conventions of recent war literature, and from both directions. After serving in Iraq in the mid-aughts, he wrote essays and journalism about the war, and also worked with fellow veteran-writer Matt Gallagher to edit Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. He was also working on a novel, starting it when he was still enlisted and spending the next ten years shaping the story. The result is War Porn, and it reads like a summary of this particular subgenre, underlining its shortcomings while pointing at new strategies.

War Porn follows three different stories: a barbecue in Utah on Columbus Day, 2004; a young soldier serving in Iraq during the first year of the war; and an Iraqi math professor in early 2003, just before the invasion. The three timelines are arranged in an A-B-C-B-A pattern, not unlike the “nesting dolls” structure of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. At the literal and figurative center is the math professor’s story, but I’ll get to that later. The novel opens, like so many books about the war, at home. It is quite possible that the literature of this war has focused on the homefront to a greater degree than any other conflict in U.S. history. Think of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, still one of the best novels on the subject. The entire story unfolds over a single day, as a company of soldiers is flown back home after winning a significant battle to be lauded as heroes during the halftime show of a football game. The war itself appears only in Billy’s memory, strobe-lit flashes of heat and smoke. Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You, Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days, Roxana Robinson’s Sparta — these and others give just as much attention, if not more, to the conflicts that unfolded at home as those abroad. This is the result, I think, of having a volunteer military, one whose members move within their own world, rarely coming into contact with the wider public. The actual wars U.S. soldiers fight can feel so distant that civilian writers may be hesitant to depict warfare, opting instead to stick to more familiar territory and examine the struggles of veterans readjusting to stateside life. Indeed, the dominant trope is a vet stricken with PTSD, his journey to become whole once again.

Scranton is having none of this. The veteran in the homefront section of War Porn is a psychopathic rapist, his taste for violence stoked in an Abu Ghraib-like compound where he served as a prison guard, photographing the cruelties he inflicted and storing them on a thumb drive. There is no redemption, no absolution of guilt. It’s here that the novel’s title takes on a double meaning. “War porn” usually refers to such images of violence, but there is also the emotional pornography of stories of returning soldiers learning to forgive themselves, assuaging the guilt felt by good-hearted readers, flattering them for their performative compassion.

The thread about the war itself is just as terse, though much funnier. A young soldier named Wilson, rifle in hand and Noam Chomsky volume in his pack, stumbles through the initial stages of the war, witnessing the invasion harden into the occupation as democracy fails to spontaneously arise from the sands of the desert. He sees little and understands less, trying only to survive. His comrades are little more than nicknames spouting acronyms and profanities. The local factions vying for power are indistinguishable to him, their lives and values alien.

Ignorant American man-children wreaking havoc both at home and abroad: is this all War Porn is? Not at all, thankfully. Nestled in the book’s center is a kind of novella about an Iraqi professor named Qasim. He’s a genuine character, torn between professional and personal responsibility. His thread is by far the most humane part of the book, and this seems by design. After dismantling those homefront and combat tropes, Scranton maps out this new path into the subject, following Qasim into entire territories of the conflict that, thus far, have largely gone unexplored in American fictional representations.

It’s a different kind of Iraq War novel, for sure, but it’s not just that. It’s an expression of Scranton’s philosophy about telling new, different stories as a means of survival. Last year, Scranton published Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, a short book about climate change. After spending a couple chapters amassing more than enough evidence to persuade the reader that our civilization is royally, unavoidably fucked, Scranton wonders what we can do next. He’s not thinking about electric cars, however. His concerns are existential. Namely, when climate change is on the verge of upending life as we know it, what stories do we tell to prepare ourselves?

Scranton returns to civilization’s early days, finding in ancient stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh guidance for coming to terms with decline and death, equipping oneself with wisdom and dignity. Answers to coping with this systemic problem lay, in all of places, in the humanities, that living document of what our species has thought and felt.

War Porn offers a similar suggestion when it comes to the United States’s seemingly perpetual involvement in the conflicts of the Middle East. Our own soldiers and bombs will do little besides incite rival powers to offer up their own unorthodox weaponry. Studying their history, reading their stories, could uncover new strategies, new approaches we’ve resigned to thinking of as intractable.

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| 10 books mentioned 5 min read

18 comments:

  1. The U.S. armed forces are a terrorist organization. I refuse to sentimentalize the atrocities they perpetuate in order to destabilize other nations

  2. What he said above. Voluntary Tools of Empire aren’t heroes. They’re not even complicated. They’re just tools. This current crop of ‘Vets” make the men who were forced to fight in Vietnam looks like mythological heroes from ancient times. I’d love to hear what Tim O’Brien has to say about this flood of memoirs.

  3. slow down lil trolls….many EOD Techs are conscientious objector’s who serve only to protect lives. I was for one ten years. I never took a single aggressive action. I safed schools, buses, homes and highways, all for love. I never fired one round, but disarmed hundreds of bombs. My mission was to protect everyone from the random horror of IED’s. I was never ordered to take an aggressive action. Quite to the contrary, I was often ordered to take bigger personal risks to benefit the uninvolved local citizens who were simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    All lives matter in this job and bomb techs are not killers. It’s part of the job, both in the US and abroad to save lives quietly every single day. They do it for love, and in the midst of mind bending horrors. We console families, recover the dead, and perform as much social work, as soldier work.

    Lastly, don’t knock the guys & gals who are the main bomb squads of the entire US. Who does your local PD call for help? Military EOD with its nationally dispersed teams respond to hundreds of bomb calls…..everyday. All for love

    Pick on the sociopathic murderers everyday, but please have some respect for the only soldiers who’s entire mission is to save lives.

  4. “slow down lil trolls”

    They’re not trolls, but I suspect you’re a murder-machine-propaganda-guzzling super-dupe. Next time a country in the “middle east” (or even Canada) invades Florida supposedly looking for WMD and leaves a trail of your dead relatives in its wake, you can post a blog column stating that turnabout is fair play and we won’t, therefore, think you’re a hypocrite. Until then… hah.

    but, back to this cringe-inducing article:

    “The enemy knew he could not defeat us on our own terms.”

    On “our” own “terms”? You mean the terms of a rampaging bully which habitually invades and occupies defenceless nations, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians while referring to the victims who try to fight back as “the enemy”? A bully, btw, which is (as is standard for a bully) also a coward? Because guess which nations don’t get invaded? The ones with real armies and/or nuclear weapons! I’d like to read a book about THAT. Call it “The Predatory Parasite That Claimed it Was an Actual Democracy but Dreamed it Was an Empire”.

    @Beamish13 A chorus of hundreds of thousands of starved, decapitated, incinerated (and merely maimed) children agrees with you. Where’s the book about them? (with a forward by Madeline Albright, perhaps…?)

    @Anon
    ” Voluntary Tools of Empire aren’t heroes.”

    Remember when the word was “mercenaries”… ?

  5. The great thing about The Millions is that it is relatively troll free. The first two commenters are expressing an opinion held by many, and did so in a respectful but heartfelt manner. Miles your opinion is worthy as well. But Steve, you articulated every thing I believe to be true. America believes itself to be some kind of moral authority. Sadly they never have been and never will be, and they must disabuse themselves of that notion for any positive change to happen. Humans have been at war and committing atrocities from time immemorial. And while I am at it, I will throw in my own personal and passionate opinion against the barbaric practice of the death penalty. Moral authority? I think not.

  7. It’s an interesting question, though — to what extent books from the Iraq war will fit into some kind of canon of American war fiction. There’s not really a comparable war in our past, in terms of what the average citizen/reader assumes about the psychology of the average soldier (where Vietnam = presumption drafted, ditto Korea and WWII, or at least in fiction/memoirs of volunteers there’s a presumption that the protagonist was swept up in a semi-justifiable patriotic fervor, because there was at the very least a larger geopolitical foe behind Korea and Vietnam). It is tough to imagine Yossarian or a Vonnegut avatar saying something like “the enemy could not defeat us on our own terms.” I remember hearing a couple editors speculating about when the definitive “Iraq war novel” was going to be discovered; it seemed like such a crass, commercial question, from a tranche of society (editors, associated literary types) who were and are so removed from the milieu of the average military member and their families, but also comical for the same reason, like they were asking when someone was going to spot an ivory-billed woodpecker. So, umm…I guess Baudrillard was right? If there’s a reason books coming out of this conflict are so “intensely personal,” it’s that if these writers were to peer outside that kind of narrative frame, they would have to be Thomas Pynchon to make some kind of awful sense of it.

  8. Many of the exemplars of fiction from the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars are commissars of the political order, like Phil Klay, the Dartmouth grad who channeled his dubious experience of war as a public affairs officer into forgettable fiction that does the business of glorifying the empire by glorifying the taciturnity, simplicity and integrity of the common soldier. It won the National Book Award, which I supposed I should take as either predictable or a shock. As an enlisted man: I thought it was risible horseshit, providing exactly the kind of predictable and reinforcing depictions of soldiers and combat that is inevitably praised by journalists for its truth, but really for its usefulness in shoring up their preconceptions. Like the above, where it is written that Castner “led EOD teams,” with a complete obliviousness to what it means to be an officer over enlisted soldiers in that context, in a contemporary military. (It doesn’t mean he ever gets close to explosives, unless his NCOs indulge him in a little personal adventure.)

    There is and will be a wave of careerist product that comes from people who are positioned and prepared to exploit their experiences, like the supposed writer who says “the enemy could not defeat us on our own terms.” Which, to be fair, is a sentence I would love to see Pynchon or Heller write a follow-up to.

  9. This comment thread is amazing.

    However, in order for us all to get our minds right, we should go out and watch “Batman vs Superman” as soon as possible.We can watch a nobly chastened Superman (the obvious stand-in for the US Gov) accused by an angry Batman (a stand-in for whom? Noam Chomsky?) of causing collateral damage while getting to the thankless duty of defending Metropolis from evil super-villains (aka turrists). In a weirdly-Freudian metaphor, Superman (our Gov) is seen humbly, nobly, submitting himself to the judgement of… erm… Our Gov… appearing before Congress to respond to accusations of Fucking Up Bigtime. The metaphor may be confused but the propaganda it delivers, sentimentally, is on-point: Superman enters the halls of Congress with such humble awe that it’s impossible to think of Our Murrkka as anything other than God’s righteousness as it moves upon the face of the Earth. And that’s what propaganda (whether in movie form or as, cough cough, BOOKS) is for.

  10. “We are all human; therefore nothing human can be alien to us.”

    I’ve often returned to those words by the great Maya Angelou as I explore literature that makes me uncomfortable. It seems this isn’t the case for some readers of The Millions when it comes to narratives and stories about the volunteers who make up America’s military in the 21st century. If the commentary were about the quality of the works in question that’s be one thing, but castigating them all – whether they joined in a fit of idealism after 9/11 or joined because it was the only way they could pay for college – as “Tools of Empire” is, yes, trolling. It’s also intellectually lazy and shows a lack of reading and education. Would you dismiss Owell as quickly after reading “Shooting an Elephant,” “Burmese Days,” or “Homage to Catalonia?” Of course not. But I suspect most in this thread have only pretended to read those books, otherwise the moral outrage and hysteria would be more grounded.

    As for the questions posed about how O’Brien, Vonnegut, etc. would feel about books and stories produced by members of today’s military – they’ve actually written on that subject. Try research and thought over uninformed castigation, you just might learn something, even if it makes you uncomfortable in the process.

  11. Trolling? Your entire comment is a troll. People are talking about the quality and the content. I amend mine: I said the author of this review was oblivious to the role of an officer over enlisted soldiers. In fact, he is an officer, not even was. So he knows very well, but is invested in mythologizing the experience. I don’t buy into the idea that personal qualification is a sufficient condition to be taken seriously, but as I indicated earlier, I was a soldier, and don’t have time for this “hating the troops” distraction. Noticed on Twitter the author of this review, also, called the commenters trolls, and one of his followers believes the myth about veterans being spit on. It comes from First Blood, which I’d argue is a more substantive treatment than this stuff.

  12. @Zoorlander – we get it, you have officer hangups. I did too, once upon a time. Then I grew up. Happens to us all.And you’re overstating the divide, at least when it comes to EOD teams. Though I haven’t yet read this book, I did read Castner’s first: he got his hands dirty, which seems to matter you (comissars, political order, dubious experience of war.)

    You sound a lot like Roy Scranton. If you’re not already familiar (or he, himself) you should check out his work.

  13. @Glen

    “whether they joined in a fit of idealism after 9/11 or joined because it was the only way they could pay for college”

    The first case would be a textbook example of being a “Tool of Empire” and the latter case describes a mercenary transaction. Which is better, in your book?

    “Try research and thought over uninformed castigation…”

    Try researching 1) the Nuremberg Tribunal 2) the cynical preparation, faked justification(s) and brutal execution of the first American-Iraqi Invasion of Aggression… and all the interlocking, illegal invasions and occupations that followed, 3) the most conservative (but city-sized) estimates for direct and indirect civilian casualties of these American Invasions for Corporate Profits-Protection and Material and Strategic Acquisition. They are mind-boggling. And any human being who participated is implicated… morally and philosophically, if not (sadly) legally.

    I have zero patience for your hawkish sophistries or any of the grotesque contortions of denial and hair-splitting your faux-objective bullshit dances through to protect your shaky self-image from the serious threats of Fact and Reason.

    But if you’d like to light a candle for the forgotten medics of the Wehrmacht (and all the others who may have seen themselves to be doing selfless or noble work within the larger machinery of Irrefutable Evil), be my guest.

    “As for the questions posed about how O’Brien, Vonnegut, etc. would feel about books and stories produced by members of today’s military – they’ve actually written on that subject.”

    I don’t think you’ve actually read (or read carefully) what Kurt Vonnegut had to say about the sort of “wars” (is it really a “war” if there’s only one real army involved?) we’re discussing, but here’s a taste:

    “Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?”

    KV: That they are nonsense.

    “My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?”

    KV: I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

    To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

    And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

    What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

    “How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?”

    When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

    And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the saying goes.

    “As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?”

    KV: Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general?

  14. “We get it, you have officer hangups. I did too, once upon a time. Then I grew up.”

    OK, Glen. We’re the trolls.

    This is never going to be productive as there are two fundamentally incompatible viewpoints at work here. Mine happens to be that these social divisions are significant. Yours: That they aren’t?

    I just don’t think either the personal memoir or reluctant warrior fiction is up to tackling the era, unless your goal is merely to transition from the military to a career in writing. The reluctant warrior stuff, in particular, seems ridiculous precisely in the era of the volunteer military. The exclusive concentration on the individual experience is convenient for divorcing the wars from absolutely everything that makes them what they are, and turns a tour-of-duty into a character-building exercise. This is the stuff purely escapist fiction. Telling that it’s always treated as laudable that these accounts are apolitical. I think it’s a political decision to make this choice.

    I’ll submit, and maybe we can agree on this, that a writer who would attempt to deal with this subject should be able to treat this spectrum of opinion on American military adventure as something other than trolling. I doubt the seriousness, and much, much more, of one who does not.

  15. Did Komatsu really tweet that his little book review was being trolled? He should be joyful his piece has engendered such a healthy and passionate discussion. I picked up a newly published book of short stories at the book store, I think the author is Luke Mogelson. I turned it over to read the blurbs and lo – it appears he is the next Tim O’Brien or Michael Herr. Such bombast, it seems every book published about the American invasion has this blurb. No doubt it is a decently written book but I put it down like it was toxic. The war machine saddens me also as it sends in youths graduating highschool in small towns with no opportunity for a decent paying job and enlisting is the only option. They are then spewed out, damaged, thank you for your service. Finally, as a true and patriotic American, one would think Komatsu would cherish the first amendment right and not confuse that with trolling. Perhaps he views the first amendment right with the same disdain as I view the second amendment right.

  16. One more comment then I’m gone. My book recommendation here is Wounding the World by Joanna Bourke, which speaks about the history of the laws of war, which are bent and distorted to suit the military, and the multi-billion dollar business of selling guns. Annie Applebaum also writes well about the history of genocide and the woeful ineffectiveness of U.N. peacekeepers, particularly in Bosnia. I read Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, and Heller’s Catch 22 in my early 20’s and have been puzzled and disturbed by war ever since.

  17. Correction: Samantha Powers wrote about genocide in A Problem From Hell, not Applebaum (she wrote a history of the Soviet Gulags).

  18. “Did Komatsu really tweet that his little book review was being trolled?”

    Typical. Too much of a coward to engage the opposition directly. Maybe they could change the comment-thread format to resemble a Shooter Game so little boys like Miles and Glen and Matthew can go “bang bang” whenever words fail them…?

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Reviews

Youth and the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle: Laura van den Berg’s The Isle of Youth

Reviews
November 5, 2013 | 10 books mentioned 3 6 min read

I began this all wrong, so the paragraph you’re reading now is actually a total do-over. Or maybe not “total” – if you swallow certain theories of the universe, a completed draft of that aborted essay exists somewhere in an alternate reality, one which follows the course of my errant lede. As far as I can tell, though, that’s still only a theory. Perhaps it seems a little too perfect that this misstep should transpire in an examination of Laura van den Berg’s second collection of short fiction, as the seven narratives in The Isle of Youth turn again and again at the point-zero restart, obsessed with roads-not-taken and changes so drastic that reality itself seems to skip to a new dimension. Perhaps it seems a little too perfect, but to read The Isle of Youth is to witness how every fresh start only brings a new set of complications.

Can this possibly be my life? Any of the six words in that sentence can hold the stress, and facing some intersection of the preposterous and the mundane, the female narrators in van den Berg’s debut collection (What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us) consistently grappled with their own spin on the question. Can THIS possibly be…? An actress settles in a detour town with a stunted career and a terminal boyfriend; an art history student drops out of college to raise her troubled little brother after their parents are killed abroad; a botanist joins a lengthy research mission in Scotland to flee a crumbling relationship. While these women confronted the quotidian fuss of a life they never foresaw, van den Berg played with a counter-level of the unfathomable, situating unseen creatures on the fringe of each narrative: Bigfoot, the mapinguari, the Loch Ness Monster; all these believe-it-or-not haunts proving a minor threat compared to the demands of just getting by.

Before the close of that first book, the procession of tangential monsters threatened to lapse into shtick, and in The Isle of Youth van den Berg forces her characters to stand down life’s bafflements with little more than their own wits, prevarications, and sleight of hand. Without a “Missing Link” to further destabilize reality, in this new batch of stories van den Berg achieves the same dramatic weight by utilizing The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

“By the time you see there’s a decision to be made,” short story master Deborah Eisenberg once wrote, “you can be pretty sure it’s a decision you’ve already made.” Originally I’d decided to use that quote as the opening sentence of this essay, but then I changed my mind after the subsequent paragraphs trailed off into an understory of Eisenberg’s gracefully canted prose, with The Isle of Youth nowhere in sight. What once appeared an ideal opening line now serves as a practical pivot point, clearing the way to set forth how – across three decades of short fiction – Eisenberg has found a way to channel narrative momentum less by plodding points and more by harnessing waves, jarring reality out of focus and gaining force by sharpening it once again.

Cobbled out of all four collections of Eisenberg’s stories, from Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986) to Twilight of the Superheroes, (2006) The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle incorporates derivations of The Many Worlds Theory (where all the possible outcomes of each decision and action exist in split copies of reality); the observer-effect (named for the guy who suggested that certainty was impossible since the tools for measurement inevitably impact the object being measured); and Viktor Shklovsky’s formalist principle of ostranenie, or “enstrangement” (wherein an artist recasts the common in a way that allows it to be appreciated anew – such as slipping an innocuous “n” into the word “estrangement” and voilà).

“We really don’t know to what degree time is linear, and under what circumstances,” suggests a mathematical genius in Eisenberg’s “Some Other, Better Otto.” “Is it actually, in fact, manifold? Or pleated? Is it frilly?”

Sure, that same genius was also prone to psychic breaks severe enough to require hospitalization, but that’s just the author being mischievous. Even in her earlier work,  from the story of a teen girl who realizes she quibbled away a typical day while unaware her mother was dead to the narrative of a middling concert pianist who wakes in a foreign city after his wife has left him, Eisenberg has constructed her work around overlaps of time, with characters knocked for a loop by the “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality about life that makes one so very nervous.”

The mysteries of time and space don’t resolve with age, observation, or relative sanity; in the post-9/11 title story of Twilight of the Superheroes, a widowed Manhattanite reflects on the “eternal, poignant weariness of youth” while his own sensory grasp of reality often betrays him: “During his waking hours, the food on his plate would abruptly lose its taste, the painting he was studying would bleach off the canvas, the friend he was talking to would turn into a stranger.”

Shklovsky’s oft-repeated quote is that estrangement serves “to make the stone stony,” and Eisenberg makes life lively through that formalist technique of defamiliarization, exploding moments where her characters see their lives in shards of bizarre impossibility, leading her fictions to crystalize at counter-epiphanies – rather than light bulb flashes of enlightenment or moral truth, readers are able to observe how direction takes shape from a blinding overwhelm.

“It is amazing to be able to find out what I want to do at any given moment, out of what seems to be nothing, out of not knowing at all,” says the narrator of Eisenberg’s “Days,” a woman who needs to develop entirely new concepts of time and identity after she quits smoking. “It is secretly and individually thrilling, like being able to open my fist and release into the air a flock of white doves.”

Should anyone in The Isle of Youth loose captive birds from their palm, don’t believe your eyes. Prestidigitators, performers, twins…amid stories of wit and misdirection van den Berg follows in Eisenberg’s suit, equally fascinated with capitulations and recapitulations, simulacra, and the suddenness of disorder. And when all else fails, van den Berg’s characters resort to the layperson’s application of The Many Worlds theory: the good old-fashioned whopper.

“Talking to someone who didn’t know me, who couldn’t separate the truth from the lie, always gave me the most ruthless sense of freedom,” says the narrator of “Acrobat.” That unbound freedom equates to a form of coherent superposition, the theoretical condition of existing in all possible states at once. Imagine two complete strangers who have yet to meet or speak – between them, a limitless world of possibility exists. Superposition, however, immediately collapses on contact: truth or lie, consequences unfold and the infinite gives way.

Distracted by a trio of Parisian street performers, the fib-prone narrator of “Acrobat” fails to hear a rather crucial bit of information about why her husband has decided to leave her right then and there. Among the next available steps, she chooses one of the least likely, following the acrobats from the Jardin de Tuileries to the Champs-Élysées to the Eiffel Tower, stopping at cafés and bistros for cigarettes and meals before finally joining the trio at a house party jammed with costumed contortionists and buskers. Though thoroughly disorienting, “Acrobat” applies The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle to avoid pure randomness, with the narrator moving forward in time while trying to recapture a missed point. With a billion swirling atoms of possibility and just that one fixed coordinate, a story takes shape as van den Berg brings the unexpected into brilliant focus.

Often the best measure of a presence is the quality of its absence, and “Lessons” is the lone story in The Isle of Youth where van den Berg abandons The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle, tipping her hand with foreshadowing and narrative ineluctability: a teenage survivalist drags her little brother along to serve as the lookout while she and her cousins pull a series of small-time stickup jobs. Inexorable forces + cute kid in peril = no room to breathe. Leaving a little wiggle room for the reader avoids manipulation, but in “Lessons” the kid’s name is Pinky and he just wants to build a robot and however many outcomes exist, you can be certain that none bode well.

Throughout the rest of The Isle of Youth, van den Berg’s protagonists continue to ask can this possibly be my life, with only the thread of family ties binding them to a prior state of being. Without ever dipping into fabulism or the surreal, the twin-swapping title story and the deceptively profound “Opa-Locka” challenge perceived reality; in the latter, sisters at loose ends decide to start their own detective agency, but as the mismatched duo puzzle out the disappearances of a client’s husband and their own long-gone father, the misguided energy of their surveillance skews the picture:

“I did feel partly responsible for whatever it was that had happened to her husband,” says the more sensible sister, “as though our mere presence had set something in motion that might have remained dormant otherwise.”

“Opa-Locka” begins amid the familiar tropes of a stakeout, but from the sisters’ flawed investigation van den Berg tells an entirely different story, one of secrets, risk, loss, and “two little girls who tried to make something out of nothing.” Such is the legerdemain of The Isle of Youth – which itself is both an ideal of new beginnings and also some shabby tourist trap off the coast of Cuba. There are few tidy resolutions between these alternate versions, though that shouldn’t come as any surprise: one of basic tenets of The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that things don’t get any easier, they only get different.

Reviews
| 10 books mentioned 3 6 min read
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Reviews

Vampires, Inner Demons, and a Desirable Form of Hell in Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps

Reviews
November 10, 2010 | 10 books mentioned 1 6 min read
The Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies take shelter in Safeways, 7-11s, and gas station bathrooms of the Pacific Northwest. They roam a countryside populated by meth houses, railways, gravel pits, and decrepit strip malls... In a way, they’re just angry teenage misfits who act out, who wreak havoc for no reason.
Reviews
| 10 books mentioned 1 6 min read
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