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John Sutherland
With an appropriately Shandyan anachronism, the filmmaker Michael Winterbottom introduces into his Tristrarin Shandy adaptation, A Cock and Bull Story, Dr Johnson's rueful truism: "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier." It's presumably in the film for ironic effect. Laurence Sterne's anti-novel is solidly anti-war: or, more correctly, anti war-story. Tristram's Uncle Toby is the world's biggest bore, monomaniacally obsessed as the old soldier is with the battle of Namur, where he won his spurs and lost his testicles.
By a nice coincidence, A Cock and Bull Story went out on general release at the same time as Sam Mendes's Jarhead -- an adaptation of Anthony Swofford's Jarhead - A Soldier's Story of Modem War. The poster for the film shows Jake Gyllenhaal's naked back as he contemplates the blazing oil wells of Kuwait - Saddam Hussein's parting gift to the Coalition.
To those of a certain age, the poster pose evokes the ubiquitous second 'world war pin-up of Betty Grable, viewed from behind, peeking saucily over her shoulder. Irony everywhere.
Swofford's memoir of life in the US Marine Corps rank and file is done in the low-down realistic style of American prose that goes back to Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac. "What follows," Swofford asserts in his preface, "is neither true nor false but what I know." It echoes, with meaningfully different stress, Kurt Vonnegut's similarly prefatory declaration in Slaughterhouse-Five that "everything in this book happened, more or less". There's more more and less less in Jarhead.
Delicate reminders of a literary consciousness peek everywhere through the battle-soiled cammies. Lance Corporal Swofford takes his epigraph from Ezra Pound's cantos -- not a work vase put with the MREs (meals ready to eat) in the Corps, one suspects. In My War: Killing Time in Iraq, Private Colby Buzzell compiles a reading list that ranges from Bret Easton Ellis to Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson and, inevitably, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Why did he enlist? A brutal drill sergeant asks Swofford, as he sweats on the square. "I got lost on the way to college," is the insolent reply (which earns him a beating). It could stand as the epigraph for all these works.
The most successful, and currently most controversial exponent of the macho memoir is James Frey -- the authenticity of whose knee-in-the groin drunkalog, A Million Little Pieces, has recently been exploded on The Smoking Gun website. Oprah Winfrey declares herself betrayed by this shamhero who, like all drunks (and many soldiers), seems given to tall tales.
Trustworthy authenticity is the active ingredient in the warrior memoir. It is also a strong selling point for fiction catering to the same, predominantly male, readership. Duncan Falconer's ripping yarn, The Operative, would never have made it on to the bestseller shelves were its author not a blooded Special Boat Service veteran. Cordite breathes off the very page. "Recently," we.-learn in the press release, "Falconer miraculously survived a bomb attack on his hotel in Baghdad, which completely obliterated his room and the computer on which he was writing The Operative." One is glad the gallant warrior survived. About his novel's survival one cannot altogether rejoice.
The story features Falconer's series hero, Stratton, like his author a virtuoso maker and planter of deadly bombs. It opens with him in the Sunni Triangle, single-handedly taking captive one of the "deck of cards" most wanted. The objective is achieved with the ruthless efficiency that England expects from its Special Force personnel. The Iraqi enemy gives Stratton considerably less trouble than his American allies - humbling, overtooled-up dolts all of them. Why, one wonders, did Tony Blair bother to bring them along on Operation Iraqi Freedom? A few men like Stratton could have done it and been back in time for the 2005 election.
Falconer is not, however, top card in this particular genre. The ace-writer is Andy McNab (not his real name, which Queen's Regulations prohibit him divulging). McNab has a new novel, Aggressor, that is currently storming the bestseller lists alongside The Operative. A veteran (like Swofford) of Desert Storm, McNab left the SAS highly decorated. Having got his two war memoirs off his chest, past the censor, and into the charts, he has embarked on a string of adventure novels, following the exploits of his SAS hero, Nick Stone -- exploits which, we may well suspect, might closely resemble the author's own.
Within the kevlar-rigid confines of his genre, McNab has become a genuinely interesting writer. He specialises in what might be called teasing authenticity. Aggressor opens with Stone and the mates in his three-man team Arse" and "Charlie") helping out the ever-bumbling Yanks at, the Bkauch Davidian Waco siege, in Texas in 1993. Having shown their allies how to do it, the SAS men are appalled at the bloody carnage that ensues. Stone resigns the service in disgust. With allies like these, who needs Saddam Hussein?
McNab cannot tell us (those Queen's Regulations again) whether he, like Stone, participated covertly at Waco. But we do know that this was exactly the moment when he, like his hero, left the SAS. Teasingly authentic, or what?
This taste for authors whose hands are still stained with blood of their profession has increased as most men, with the abolition of conscription and the shrinkage of the armed forces, miss out on soldiering. Nowadays, Mendes's film suggests, even the soldiers themselves feel left out of war. Swofford, a sniper, and Troy, his observer, never catch up with the action. They are, as Swofford bitterly complains in his epilogue, denied the "kill shot" he has been trained to deliver from ranges of up to two miles. He never gets that close. It's the brutally indiscriminate Warthog (ground-attack plane), not the surgical sniper's bullet, that does the damage, leaving a carpet of destruction along which the foot soldiers disconsolately trudge.
For Swofford, Buzzell and Kayla Williams the real hardship of military life is not war (even in wartime) but "soldierisation" - the rigours of basic training and its horribly efficient techniques of dehumanisation. As Buzzell notes, during these "hell weeks" the recruit is forbidden, on pain of physical assault, from using any personal pronouns. All humanity is squeezed out, leaving only such grotesque fetishisations as "love my rifle more than you" (a quote from one of the basic training chants).
"Every man," says Dr Johnson. What about every woman? The US has moved faster than any other army in female recruitment. It could not now function without them. "Women," as Kayla Williams tells us, "are currently authorized to sign up for 87 per cent of all enlisted military specialities." Williams herself, after learning Arabic, served as a front-line military intelligence operative. An attractive woman (as the numerous photographs testify) and college-educated, Williams enlisted out of a mixture of economic motives and moral confusion - divorce and the unresolved residue of childhood sexual abuse. Patriotism was never a factor.
Williams's recollections are interesting for what they reveal of the embarrassments of being a woman in a man's world, where that manliness is asserted by constant, barely legal, misogyny. How can a woman make it among all the BSDs (big swinging dicks) where the motto is, "bros before hos" and women are categorised as either sluts (they screw anyone) or bitches (they screw anyone but you)?
With difficulty, is the answer. The body fluid that is most prominent in urine. There is a particularly vivid description of a 10-hour truck journey across the desert without comfort stops in which the troops are instructed by their commanding officer to relieve themselves in bottles. and the women? "Had anyone informed him that peeing in a bottle was not the same as it was for a guy?" Apparently not.
Williams was good at her job and was promoted to sergeant. She was finally broken down -- not by the hardships of war, but by the sheer crassness of macho-military culture: "The guys I considered my friends were treating me like a 'girl'. I was tits, a piece of ass, a bitch or a slut or whatever, but never really a person .. I couldn't handle it any more."
Bruised feminity protrudes through the masculinised rhetoric. William's book poses the question: can an army, if it is to fight, ever be truly civilised? It somewhat weakens the effect that she was obliged to rely on a male (and civilian) co-author to get her book into print.
Like Swofford, Williams does not record killing anyone (although she does admit to some Lyndie England-style abuse of Iraq captives). Colby Buzzell did kill enemy combatants with his trusty M240-Bravo LMG (Light machine Gun). Recruited into the Stryker armoured-car units, mustered specifically for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Buzzellvividly demonstrates how far technology has advanced since Desert Storm. The weaponry (the ubiquitously murderous Warthog, for example) was much the same. But between 1991 and 2003, the internet took hold.
There is a telling moment in My War in which Buzzell gets an e-mail from hisdad (a Vietnam vet) asking if he's OK. Buzzell Sr. has been watching his son's unit, that same day, in action in Mosul on CNN. This instantaneity and satellite communication cross-over between home and front lines is quite new. William's and Swofford's accounts are, in Wordsworthian fashion, recollected after the event in tranquility. They are acts of memory. Old style. Buzzells account is blog-immediate, during the event. New style.
JARHEAD:
A Soldier's Story of Modem War
Anthony Swofford Scribner $24/0.99, 272 pages
THE OPERATIVE
Duncan Falconer
Time Warner
$9.99, 440 pages
AGGRESSOR
Andy McNab
Bantam Press
$25/EI7.99, 419 pages
LOVE MY RIFLE MORE
THAN YOU:
Young, Female &
in the US Army
Kayla Williams
W W Norton/Weidenfeld Nicolson
$24.95/fl2.99, 288 pages
MY WAR:
Killing Time in Iraq
Colby Buzzell
Putnam Adult/Corgi Books
$25.95/f6.99, 358 pages
It seems to have happened accidentally. Buzzell began by keeping a paper journal and then, in the tedium of waiting for his next kill, went on to use the internet cafes, set up a alongside the PXs (post exchange stores) and non-alcohol-serving canteens, to post his thoughts on a website.
The site was embellished (in contravention of copyright) with Picasso's "Guernica" and the artist's caption: "Painting is not made to decorate apartments, it's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy." The enemy was not necessarily Iraqi.
If he hadn't quite invented it, Buzzell was a pioneer of what is now familiar as the "milblog", any number of which now flourish. His is exceptionally kood. Particularly, effective are -those postings where he juxtaposes the "bullshit" dispatched by the "embedded" reporters along with what really happened.
To his surprise, once his identity was rumbled, his commanders encouraged Buzzell's milblogging activities ("You seem to have been influenced by Hunter S. Thompson," one of them mildly observed). Why? Because the brass, just like the grunts, resent those chairbound assholes in Washington who, in their ineffable misunderstanding of strategy, launched them on this no-win Iraqi adventure. The milblog, like its far distant progenitor, William Howard Russell's dispatches to The Times in 1855, has changed the nature of war.
With his iPod in one hand, and his BlackBerry in the other, Buzzell represents the warrior of the future. The next war will make interesting reading.
Under syndication arrangement with FE
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