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.

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Essays Reviews

The Perils of Writing Wilderness: On Dave Eggers’s ‘Heroes of the Frontier’

Essays Reviews
July 26, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 7 7 min read

In the last few months, Alaska has been brutal to people I know. A friend who’s so knowledgeable about the wilderness he teaches college classes on the subject got mauled by a bear on a mountain outside Haines. The outdoors-savvy boyfriend of a friend disappeared while running or hiking outside Nome. A bush pilot I flew with last year crashed into Admiralty Island; he and all but one of the passengers died.

But if Alaska can be brutal, it can also be transcendent. Another friend recently caught a beautiful king salmon with a fly she tied herself; the photo of her holding it conveys a form of worship. Earlier this summer, I traveled to Admiralty Island — Kootznoowoo, or “fortress of the bears” in Lingít, the indigenous language of the area. For hours, we watched male and female brown bears court — running away, snarling, following each other as if they were connected by an ever-shortening rope. For the last few years, my boyfriend and I have packed inflatable boats, food, and our tent and floated down a different river in Alaska or the Yukon — the Pelly, the Big Salmon, the Nisutlin, the Stikine. We’ve listened to a dozen wolves howl and bark on each side of the river around us long into the night. We’ve watched a pack of them ghost in and out of the trees, barely visible as they run. We’ve seen kingfishers beat in place above the water, ravens chase ospreys, a cow moose sheltering her two calves as she watched us float by, black and brown bears eating sedges.

Many fiction writers get wilderness wrong.

I recently received a copy of Dave Eggers’s newest book, Heroes of the Frontier, which is set in Alaska. I like Eggers’s books. I first read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in high school, when my love for it verged on the babbling. I appreciate the generous, expansive nature of his writing, and because he’s Dave Eggers, I really enjoyed everything about the new book that relates to people. Josie, the protagonist, is complicated, believable, moving, frequently hilarious — so is the way she interacts with others. The towns, and their quirky, touristy craziness, ring true.

This is not the case for the wilderness. At one point in the book, Josie watches a water snake emerge from a river and eat a snail. The only problem? There are no snakes in Alaska. In a later section, Josie and her two children pause to watch “a ten point buck.” Only problem? There are no “ten point bucks” in interior Alaska. Every now and then mule deer stray over from Canada, but when they do they’re so unusual people write newspaper articles about them. A “ten-point buck?” No.

In the first ten pages, Josie and the kids drive through an animal park that advertises its Alaskan mammals. They see “a pair of moose, and their new calf, none of them stirring.” I realize this is a zoo, but male moose do not hang around with their calves. They saw “an antelope, spindly and stupid; it walked a few feet before stopping to look forlornly into the grey mountains beyond. Its eyes said, Take me, Lord. I am now broken.” Again, a zoo, but there are no antelope in Alaska. If it wanted to flee into the Alaskan mountains it would find itself just as lonely and would die of cold, wolves, or starvation come winter. When they’re finished with the zoo, a ranger points “to a mountain range nearby, where, he said, there was a rare thing: a small group of bighorn sheep, cutting a horizontal line across the ridge, east to west.” Bighorn sheep do not live in Alaska. Alaska has Dall sheep, which are a different species.

To most Alaskans, these are big mistakes. But when reading Heroes of the Frontier, I was also thinking about something more intangible — the nature of a place versus the nature of a story set in that place.

Much of the novel is set on the road, but at the end Josie and her two children, Paul and Ana, decide to go for a hike. It ends up taking much longer than they anticipated, and they’re unprepared. There is lightning. It begins to rain; they get soaked. They decide not to go back the way they’ve come, but to run from copse of trees to copse of trees, somehow staying on the trail. If there’s one thing indicated by the very large number of people that get lost and die or have to be rescued in the Alaskan wilderness every year, it’s that it is very easy to accidentally veer off-trail, especially if the trail is not well traveled or near a city, especially if it’s not the best of circumstances. But somehow, despite the fact that they’re literally running for their lives during a massive storm, Josie and the kids keep finding clues as to where they’re going.

There’s something described as “an avalanche,” though its only elements seem to be rock and shale — Josie slides across it on her back with her upper body clad in only a bra, but Eggers never mentions snow, ice or cold. Somehow, Josie and her children make it to a cabin she didn’t realize was there when they began the hike. It is decked out with balloons and a feast for the “Stromberg Family Reunion.” I can get with a cabin; a cabin can be the deus ex machina of real-life salvation. But a cabin decorated and then abandoned, miles and an arduous hike into the wilderness, containing a table “overflowing with juices and sodas, chips, fruit and a glorious chocolate cake under a plastic canopy?” I wanted to believe in this cabin — I hope there is a cabin like that out there for all of us — but I could think of too many people for whom this cabin didn’t exist.

I am by no means immune to the perils of writing wilderness myself. I recently showed a new chapter in my novel-in-revision to my boyfriend Bjorn, a life-long Alaskan. In it, a young girl wanders around lost on Chichagof Island. It was the chapter he liked least.

“She would be afraid,” he said. “When does she start feeling like prey?”

My problem was that I wanted my character to be challenged, but like Eggers, I hadn’t accounted for the reality of the place that would challenge her.

A few years ago, Bjorn and I hiked the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail, the route many would-be miners took to the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. It was before the official start of the season, and except for a very fit German guy in his mid-twenties, we were the only hikers. We spent the first night at Sheep Camp, the last stop before the pass; the German guy woke before us, and we followed his tracks the rest of the day. We summited the pass in a late-May snowstorm on steps Bjorn cut with his ice ax and emerged from the clouds into what a Canadian ranger we’d passed called “a bluebird day.” It was surreal. We were still using our snowshoes, but bumblebees buzzed around us and landed on the snow. We started steaming. We followed the route the snowshoe-wearing rangers had flagged…right over a half-frozen pond. The German guy hadn’t brought snowshoes, and we could see the hole where he’d fallen through up to his waist, the drag marks where he’d pulled himself out. As we walked, we saw his footsteps — he’d been post-holing, sinking through the deep snow up to his crotch with each step. Post-holing makes for incredibly miserable walking. A few miles later, we saw a tiny figure waving to us frantically. The German guy hadn’t brought sunglasses, and his eyes were hurting; he was going snow-blind. Bjorn gave him an extra pair. The rangers had told him they’d marked the trail to Happy Camp, and he was wondering if he’d taken a wrong turn. We got out our GPS and figured out we were on the snow-covered trail, but the rangers had stopped flagging two or three miles short.

That is what happens in wilderness when you are unprepared — even with a flagged route on a trail thousands have walked before, even if you are experienced. You don’t magically find a party-food-filled abandoned cabin decorated for a family reunion, complete with a sheet cake under a protective dome. You end up miserable and wet and exhausted and snow-blind and far from where you’ve tried to be, and if you’re lucky, it’s a sunny day and there are other people around who can help you. It’s a transformative experience to realize how vulnerable, and how lucky, you are.

The idea of owing more to luck than courage, however, contradicts one of the basic themes of Heroes of the Frontier — that through acting bravely and persevering, you and those around you (in Josie’s case, Paul and Ana) can become the “heroes” of the title. That conflict is one of the difficulties of writing wilderness in fiction. Wilderness is what it is, not what a book requires it to be. The Alaskan wilderness challenges people in ways they don’t anticipate, and it is not kind to the inexperienced and underprepared, no matter how “brave” they might be.

Last year, I went to a panel in which Juneau writer Ernestine Hayes, author of Blonde Indian, said “A sense of place arises from the place itself… it is (not) a panorama to be conquered.” I thought of this as I read these lines, after Josie and company arrive at the cabin: “Every part of their being was awake. Their minds were screaming in triumph, their arms and legs wanted more challenge, more conquest, more glory.” At the end of Heroes of the Frontier, Alaska is a panorama conquered.

Ultimately, the novel is about a woman escaping the fears, restrictions and regrets of her life and trying to shape her children into good, brave people, like those she imagines live in Alaska. It’s an admirable goal. But both in towns and out of them, Josie, Paul and Ana seem charmed. In the wild, that means Eggers’s Alaska loses something essential to itself.

So here are some questions. Where is the line between artistic license and error? If we take liberties with the character of a place and we are aware of it, should we acknowledge that we’ve done so? This isn’t nonfiction, after all, and in spite of its bighorn sheep, Heroes of the Frontier is an enjoyable story.

Writers who write wilderness have a responsibility to it, partly because so many of us are disconnected from it, and partly because it’s been misrepresented so often. We’ve now constructed so much of the world — even in our national parks — that most of us never experience real wilderness, a place you can’t see from the road. It exists with or without us. It means only and incredibly itself, and when we are there, we become a part of it — something that can be terrifying, or exhilarating, or both.

There is lots of insightful, beautiful writing about Alaskan and northern wilderness, both fiction and nonfiction — see Seth Kantner, Sherry Simpson, Velma Wallis, a vast array of others. There are people who write wilderness gorgeously outside the context of Alaska as well — Louise Erdrich, Cormac McCarthy. If there’s anything wilderness can teach you, it’s the dizzying breadth of what you do not know, and if what you write is to resonate as true there is no lesson more important. So if you’re going to write wilderness, experience it. Respect it. Be prepared and scared and awestruck and relieved. Research. Fact check. Then represent the place you are writing as honestly as you can. You owe it to a world that has lost a sense of true wild.

Image courtesy of the author.

Essays Reviews
| 10 books mentioned 7 7 min read
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Reviews

The White Earth by Andrew McGahan: A Review

Reviews
January 23, 2006 | 10 books mentioned 2 min read

Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth was a big deal when it came out in Australia in 2004. His previous novels had given him a following, but The White Earth was the winner of the Miles Franklin Prize, Australia’s richest literary award, catapulting him to a new level of recognition. The book is a multigenerational tale in which the generations collide. Young William and his mother are cast from their homestead in Queensland when William’s father burns to death in a farming accident. They are taken in by William’s cranky great uncle, John McIvor, who lives holed up in a decrepit mansion on what’s left of what was once a great homestead called Kuran Station. There is still enough land left at the Station to lust after though, and William’s sickly but greedy mother sets out to make sure that William will be the heir to his hermit uncle. The main action of the book takes place in 1992 and is filled with what I understand to be the political questions of that time, mostly having to do with compensating aborigines for the ancestral land that was taken from him. All of this makes old John McIvor something of a crank, obsessed with protecting his land and leader of a fringe organization whose membership has racist tendencies fueled by fears that cityfolk will allow their farms to be taken away. Luckily McGahan provides flashbacks to the life of young John McIvor so we can see how Kuran Station, taken from him when he was young and regained after middle age, became his life’s obsession. Though not as masterful as other books in this same mold and a bit heavyhanded in the use of certain images (men on fire), The White Earth is an enjoyable epic of the struggle for land Down Under.

Reviews
| 10 books mentioned 2 min read
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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

Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels and In the Company of Soldiers by Rick Atkinson

Reviews
December 29, 2004 | 10 books mentioned 2 min read

As the war in Iraq commenced what seems like ages ago with the frenetic coverage of embedded reporters and the televised firefights, I remember looking forward to reading some of the books that would inevitably come out of this media frenzy. In the nearly two years since there have been many of these books, some good and some bad. I recently read a couple of them. Actually I listened to Naked in Baghdad by NPR correspondent Anne Garrels on the long drive from Chicago to New York. The audiobook is read by Garrels and her husband Vint Lawrence. Garrels’ strong, familiar voice added a lot to the experience. Though Garrels was one of just a handful of American journalists to stay in Baghdad during the run-up to war, the political and military machinations going on around her are just one element of the book. The meat of the book is devoted to her personal relationships with her fellow journalists, minders, drivers, and the myraid Iraqi officials who spent the regime’s final days collecting bribe money. As an inside look into the harrowing life of a war correspondant, the book is brilliant, filled with menacing bad guys and explosions that are way too close for comfort. But Garrels is at her absolute best as she delves into the backroom politics of the world of the macho foreign correspondant. She revels in the fact that American television left Baghdad before the war, leaving only an old school contingent of print reporters to cover the invasion from the capital. She pulls no puches as she berates CNN’s arrogance and Geraldo Rivera’s foolishness. Her demand is for professionalism over sensationalism.Most journalists were forced by uncertainties in Baghdad to cover the war by embedding with American units as they invaded Iraq. Rick Atkinson was one of these embedded journalists, and his book, In the Company of Soldiers tells the story of his time with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Aside from his duties with the Washington Post, Atkinson is also a military historian of some repute (his World War II book An Army at Dawn won a Pulitzer in 2003) and it shows. He is interested most in the tactics employed during the invasion and in the commanders who implemented them. Where Garrels delivers portraits of shady Iraqi bureaucrats and flamboyant European journalists, Atikinson’s narrative is tied to Major General David Petraeus, a no-nonesense military man. The 101st, and Atkinson along with them, saw their share of action during those early days, but much of what transpired during those first weeks feels like a footnote — or ancient history — compared to all that has happened since. The most interesting parts of the book are the most personal. Atkinson’s daily struggles against the harshness of the desert and the austerity of military life shine far more brightly than the methodical movements of the troops he travelled with. Both books take the US to task for fouling up the aftermath of the invasion, but where Garrels’ concerns seem to arise from her daily interactions with Iraqis, Atkinson’s epilogue seems hastily tacked on, an attempt to save the book from being made irrelevant by the nasty turn that this war has taken.RELATED: In October I met Anne Garrels, and I met Rick Atkinson in October 2003.

Reviews
| 10 books mentioned 2 min read
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Reviews

Style and the Man: On Adam Begley’s Updike

Reviews
June 20, 2014 | 10 books mentioned 9 6 min read


1.
John Updike surely had the most enviable career in postwar American letters. He was published early, in the place where he most sought acceptance, and his talent was recognized, remarked, and encouraged at every stage. He seems never to have labored outside his writerly vocation, and almost everything he ever wrote found a home. Self-doubt seems rarely to have visited him. As a writer of prose, his efficiency and durability over more than five decades were almost disconcerting.

He was likewise at ease in the social world, despite a mild stammer. He negotiated the transition from rural Pennsylvania to Harvard with little strain, and from there the Lampoon, The New Yorker, and the Academy of Arts and Letters, vaulting almost carelessly from honor to roseate honor. For a man who jealously guarded his selfhood, he was to a surprising extent an institutional man, one who spent half a century associated with a single magazine (The New Yorker) and, after a false start, a single publisher (Knopf). Tall, attractive, affably wolfish, he also negotiated his way into the beds of many women, and reported back to us on what he found there, the sexual revolution in situ. He was divorced, suffered hostile reviews, endured bouts of psoriasis. But for the most part, John Updike’s life was an embarrassment of riches, as his genial but also slightly smirky public manner attested.

Miraculously, the lapidary Updike style seemed to arrive fully formed, as evidenced in his much-anthologized New Yorker piece about Ted Williams’s final game at Fenway Park, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” published when Updike was 28-years-old: the effortless phrase making (“a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”); the revelation of beauty nested within the ordinary; the final flourish that enacts the very phenomenon it describes (“So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.”). Like Williams, Updike was something of a remote god, if a largely benevolent one. He would not pretend to find writing, or his own passage through life, arduous. In an interview given shortly before he died, he observed of the fin de siécle salon painter John Singer Sargent (like Updike — and Williams — a prodigy), “We’re drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do, and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. We don’t really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. Sargent misses getting top marks because he made it look easy.” These observations are shadowed by our knowledge of Updike’s relationship with his own readers, the sense that some final measure of love was withheld on both sides.

2.
Updike died in 2009, and the public man of interviews and graduation speeches still seems to wait just offstage. This creates a problem of critical distance that is especially acute for Adam Begley, to whom Updike was also vivid in a more personal way, as a family friend. A second generation Harvard man, the son of the Wall Street lawyer-turned-novelist Louis Begley (like Updike, Harvard ’54), Begley knows the social and cultural terrain of Updike’s adult life well, and he renders Updike’s years at Harvard and The New Yorker of the Shawn period with authority. Begley also reconstructs the physical, familial, and psychological terrain of Updike’s Pennsylvania boyhood with subtlety and care, drawing connections between the writer’s family life and earliest aspirations without succumbing to a reductive determinism. Begley provides a clear and sympathetic portrait of Updike’s mother, the dominating presence of his early life and herself an aspiring writer, and he persuasively identifies the pivotal moment when Updike, as a Harvard freshman, began the gentle but decisive separation from her that allowed him to move unfettered toward adulthood. Begley knows that ultimately — as John O’Hara (born Pottsville, Penn., 1905 — and a special Updike favorite) put it — an artist is his own fault.

The biographer who renders a persuasive portrait of the artist’s evolution to age thirty does a good deal — perhaps most of what needs to be done. But Updike loses energy in its second half, as questions both critical and biographical are raised that Begley seems reluctant to take on. Remarkably, he says far too little about Updike’s prose style, assuring us only that it is brilliant. This is a crucial omission. Updike’s style is one of the most singular in postwar American fiction, an instrument both powerful and subtle, and the experience of reading Updike is defined by the contours of that style. If you are going to make major claims for Updike as a writer, as Begley wishes to do, you must show how Updike’s style and his cosmology correspond, and you must give an account of the effects that style produces. Begley has been writing literary journalism for two decades, much of it of high quality. Surely one of the advantages of having a critic of his range do this job rather than a professional biographer would be that the critic is likely to be sensitive to questions of form and possess the vocabulary to talk about them. Begley had the resources and, one would think, the mandate to attempt a significant exploration. His reticence is puzzling, and it has to be counted as a missed opportunity.

There was always a countercurrent of negative critical feeling about Updike, beginning with Orville Prescott’s scolding February 1963 review of The Centaur in The New York Times (“it contains numerous obscenities, no more loathsome than in many recent novels, but entirely unnecessary”) and gathering momentum in recent years as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and James Wood all published lengthy repudiations. Franzen and Wallace’s criticisms might be written off in part as Bloomian filial agon, but Wood’s sustained attack is a more serious blight on Updike’s reputation, both because Wood is so skilled a critic and because what he values most in fiction — a strong visual sense, figurative vigor, a complex philosophical substructure — are things Updike is generally thought to provide in abundance. Begley largely sidesteps Wood’s increasingly pointed demurrals, perhaps in the name of letting the work speak for itself. It is true that in the long run the best of Updike’s work — the Rabbit novels, In the Beauty of the Lillies, The Collected Stories — will survive, or not, largely without regard to the current critical debate. Still, Begley does not serve Updike or his readers well by wishing that debate away.

Updike was a prolific and talented reviewer and essayist, but his conception of the critic’s work is a modest one; he believed that critical work, his own not excepted, was necessarily for lesser stakes than the work of the artist himself. Begley seems to share his subject’s view that critics, like children, are to be seen but not heard. In his March 2009 review of Cheever, Blake Bailey’s celebrated biography of a writer Updike greatly admired and whose thematic concerns he shared, Begley expresses admiration for Bailey’s research (“impeccable and exhaustive”) and his assessment of Cheever’s writing (“judicious and nuanced”), but he regrets that Bailey gave the more sordid aspects of Cheever’s life — his alcoholism, his sexual confusion, and his self-loathing — such fulsome treatment. Begley’s judgment here seems to have as much to do with manners as with literature; he seems to feel not only that knowing the facts of Cheever’s erotic life does not help us understand Cheever’s work, but that to discuss them is somehow bad form. But Bailey, unlike Begley, is an immodest critic, one who has sought to create works of expressive power and to achieve himself the status of a literary artist. The two views are finally irreconcilable.

It is true that a literary biographer must maintain some ultimate measure of respect for his subject, if only because the work compels it even if the life does not. A biography that dwelled too long on Updike’s marital infidelities, his weaker books, his occasional prickliness would risk both missing the point of the life entirely and burying the work beneath that life’s contingencies. James Atlas’s unaccountably hostile Bellow, an exemplar of the adversarial school of biography, sometimes does just that (though there is much in Bellow that is good, and Atlas deals with Bellow’s own vivid style at length). But in order to undermine the stronger possible criticisms of Updike, you must at least appear to have given them a fair hearing. Begley pulls his punches too often as to both the writer and his critics, with the unintended effect of draining some measure of interest from the subject. He has achieved a remarkable negative feat; Updike is so discreet and equable that after 500 pages it leaves the world, in terms of Updike’s reputation, just as it found it.

3.
Despite his loving attention to quotidian detail of a specifically American character, John Updike is a quintessentially cool writer. Through his technical mastery, he always wished to move the reader just a bit more than he had been moved himself. Like Ted Williams, he sought self-sufficiency even as he sought public acknowledgement. Like his wayward but ennobled hero Rabbit Angstrom, Updike stands for the irreducible, irrepressible self, that kernel of being that may be bartered only at enormous spiritual cost.

Like Sargent and Williams, Updike has been made to suffer for his self-sufficiency. What will become of his posthumous reputation, whether he will have a community of readers at all in fifty years, or in twenty-five, still feels very much like an open question. Several lovely encomia followed his death: Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker (“one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American since Henry James to get himself fully expressed”); Julian Barnes in The Guardian (“the Rabbit quartet was the best American novel of the postwar period”); Ian McEwan in the New York Review (“American letters … is a leveled plain.”) Despite these prominent champions, Updike is deeply unfashionable just now. This cultural moment, with its peaking anxieties about gender and privilege, does not belong to him. Adam Begley seems to have hoped to contribute to an Updike revival, but his curiously diffident biography preaches only to the choir.

Reviews
| 10 books mentioned 9 6 min read
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