My War: Killing Time in Iraq
by Colby Buzzell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Colby BuzzellEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10
ISBN: 0399153276
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Book Reviews of My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Book Review: F.J.H (the censored version)
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently read Anthony Swofford's review of My War, by Colby Buzzell. Swofford, a former Marine sniper and Gulf War veteran, is the author of Jarhead, the successful memoir of his Gulf War experience, which has recently shown up on the Hollywood big screen as a top box office seller.
All in all, I think Jarhead was a fairly good read. Criticisms abound regarding the manner in which Swofford portrays the Marines-which for the most part seem to stem from people who cling to the sentiment and disillusion that all things military must be John Wayne like. There is though, an annoying overtone of whining in his account, and an even more annoying hint of supplication to the cultured academic elite (which seems to be his intended audience), as if with a wink and a nod he readily validates that echelon's misguided and misinformed perceptions and stereotypes of the military, and in particular, all-male combat culture they so disdain.
The most redeeming quality of his memoir, which was illuminated even better in the movie, is Swofford's honest portrayal of having never squeezed the trigger. In the first Gulf War, there was absolutely no substantial role for light infantry, let alone snipers. While Jarhead may be the defining account of a sniper's role in the Gulf War, it is not the defining account of the war-which will be better served by someone who directly participated in the armored blitzkrieg of a slaughter that it was (i.e., someone from the 1 out of every 14 Gulf War soldiers who actually did squeeze the trigger).
I'm not here though to focus on Jarhead, I'll leave that to the sophomore at Brown or Amherst or Dartmouth...as a former dirt soldier of the first Gulf War, I'm here to zero in on My War. I found Swofford's review of My War to not only be, pardon the pun, entirely off the mark, but startlingly offensive. The crux of his review seems to be a critique that Buzzell's writing is not seasoned and is not "literary" enough, and comes off more like a collection of blog entries...again, more supplicating, or shall I say sucking up, to his Columbia Journalism Review audience.
Buzzell's writing is indeed not seasoned, it is charred and sizzling meat plucked straight out of the fire-it'll burn you while it nourishes you. Buzzell's writing does perhaps lack some kind of literary flourish-but so what? Again, when I read Jarhead, I'm reading the witty, dry prose of a University of Iowa Writers Workshop project-when I read My War, I'm back on O.P., in the foxhole with a fellow two year enlistee dog, discussing life the way that only dirt soldiers do. When I read Jarhead, I'm sitting in a freshman creative writing class being forced to listen to a young professor read his own writing to the class in a painstakingly obvious effort to get into the pants of the freshman girls. When I read My War, its right after the last formation and I'm up on the third floor of the barracks, with my BDUs still half on but with a bottle of Mad Dog hoisted to my lips...
Swofford's various critiques are rather pointless, trifling, and somewhat irrational. He mocks the fact that Buzzell was a "typical Northern California stoner kid" who joins the Army in a typical way, complete with taking pains to pass the piss test and marrying for the extra cash...he mocks the precise beauty of this book-it's unflinching and non-judging look at the everyday realities of the common junior soldier. Who the hell does Swofford think joins the Army (or Marines for that matter)?
Furthermore, and more importantly, Swofford seems to diminish the profundity of My War. He should know better. Many a Gulf War soldier left the theatre with a nagging and certain knowledge that their experience was but a prelude of something way bigger to come...we knew we'd be back. We knew that "next time" we'd be going to Baghdad. The common rejoinder was "next time, dog, it ain't goin' to be no joke." And it has not been a joke. For those of us who did grind up Iraqi lives in our track treads the first time around, My War is captivating in a way that Jarhead never could be...we knew the desert slaughter was giving birth to the surreal urban nightmare that our soldiers now find themselves in, and Buzzell documents it for us in a language we well know.
In time, history students and lovers of the literary will look to My War as a defining first person account of the overall Army experience in the Middle East, while Jarhead will rightly be passed off as some kind of Tim O'Brian wannabe. Swofford's review reads like a severe case of penis envy.
My War Rocks.
Summary of My War: Killing Time in Iraq
A raw, edgy, yet intimate new voice from the front lines in Iraq-the most authentic we have had yet from the war, heralding this generation's Catch-22.Like many of his generation, Colby Buzzell was jumping from one dead-end job to another, a paycheck away from moving back home. He spent his time skateboarding and killing as many brain cells as humanly possible. Tired of the monotony, he found himself in front of an army recruiter. Within months he was in Iraq, a machine gunner in the controversial Stryker Brigade Combat Team, an army unit on the cutting edge of combat technology, and the first of its kind.
This is the startlingly honest story of a young man and a war. Trapped amid "guerilla warfare, urban-style" in Mosul, Iraq, Buzzell was struck by the bizarre, absurd, often frightening world surrounding him. He began writing an online web log describing the war-not as it was being reported by CNN or in briefings on Capitol Hill, but as he experienced it. The result is an extraordinary narrative, rich with unforgettable scenes: the fierce firefight in which the resistance came from "men in black"; chain-smoking in the guard tower, counting the tracer rounds fired over the city; the raid on an Iraqi home during which a woman couldn't stop screaming as her husband was being taken away; and the hesitation of a young soldier who had been passed around from platoon to platoon because he was too afraid to fight. As the popularity of his "blog" grew, Buzzell became the embedded reporter the army couldn't control despite its best-and often hilarious-efforts to do so.
My War is the debut of a fresh and remarkable voice, and it is already being compared to the classics of youth and combat Herr's Dispatches and Heller's Catch-22. But My War is much more than a war story; it is the story of a generation caught between the hyper-reality of a technological age and an ever more complicated and dangerous world.
My War is a book that will challenge many of the most common assumptions about the Iraq War and the people fighting in it. Colby Buzzell, the book's author and a U.S. Army machine-gunner who did a year-long tour in Iraq, is not the stereotypical small-town soldier from a Red State. He grew up in San Francisco eating pot brownies at the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, skateboarding, and listening to punk and heavy metal. He supported Ralph Nader for president, reads George Orwell, and his dad worked in Silicon Valley. But he was sick of his "life in oblivion," bouncing around from one dead-end job to another. As Buzzell writes in his typically gritty prose, "I didn?t want to get all old and have my bratty grandkids ask me, 'Grandpa, where were you during the Iraq war?' and me going, 'Oh, I was busy doing temp work and data entry for 12 bucks an hour.'"
In search of adventure, Buzzell joined the army and got sent to Iraq. First stationed in the ultra-dangerous Sunni Triangle, he quickly mastered how to use the M240 Bravo machine gun: "Just get behind that muthafucka and just fire it." His fellow soldiers, mostly hip-hop fans or headbanging metal-heads like him, killed time watching porn on mini-portable DVD players or listening to Metallica on their iPods while on patrol. Long boring spells were interrupted by wild fits of confusing action. On one of Buzzell's first missions, two platoons fired thousands of rounds at near point-blank range at an unarmed Iraqi civilian. Amazingly, he survived. Out of boredom, Buzzell started a blog, one of the first by an ordinary "Joe" grunt in Iraq. It became a media sensation and got Buzzell in trouble with the REMFs ("Rear Echelon Mutha Fuckers") because of his less-than-glamorous portrayal of the war and his superiors, whom he accuses of constantly lying to the public and the soldiers under their command. My War may be disappointing to readers looking for deeper introspections on the moral questions behind the war, but it is a pretty convincing case against the claim that everything in Iraq is going fine. --Alex Roslin
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