APRIL 1, 2003
WAR IN IRAQ -- COMMENTARY
By Thane Peterson
War Through a Soldier's Haunted Eyes | A new book by a U.S. sniper in the first Gulf War offers a horrifying and compelling glimpse into the mentality of the battlefield
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Two books are essential reading if you want to gain insight into the war in Iraq as U.S., British, and Australian troops approach Baghdad. The first is Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (Penguin, $13.95) by Mark Bowden, the brilliantly reported reconstruction of the debacle in Somalia, where U.S. troops had ventured on what was supposed to be a humanitarian mission, but which ended with the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a vicious firefight after two Black Hawk helicopters crashed in the densely populated city of Mogadishu. The book hints at a worst-case scenario if coalition forces are forced to take Baghdad in house-to-house fighting in the face of a hostile local population (see BW Online, 10/11/01, "Black Hawk Down Redux?").
The other book I highly recommend right now is the just-published Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (Scribner, $24) by Anthony Swofford, who was a sniper in the first Gulf War. If you suspect, as I do, that the endless TV interviews with troops at the front provide a very sanitized version of what they're thinking and experiencing, this book is for you.
In a jacket blurb, the novelist William Boyd calls Jarhead "a hugely disturbing insight into the minds of the very young men who long to go to war." This is an angry, profane, and probably very truthful account of what it's like to be an infantryman (or "jarhead," as they're known among themselves) in a hot, dirty, horribly violent desert campaign like the one U.S. troops are in now.
DIPLOMACY WORKS. It's a jolting, often beautifully written book, but for me it's best as a sort of sociology of the soldier. I'm strongly opposed to this war for many reasons, but the main one is that it's being led by privileged elitists, most of whom wouldn't dream of sending their own kids to fight. Without a military draft like the ones during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, there's no pretense of equality.
I believe that if hawks like President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz thought for one instant that they -- or their sons and daughters, nieces, and nephews -- might be the ones killed or maimed in Iraq, the thought would wonderfully concentrate their minds. All the easy talk of collateral damage would fall away, and the world would suddenly discover that wars like the one in Iraq (and Vietnam) are avoidable through skillful and effective diplomacy.
America's leaders, however, don't think like that. Instead, they recruit young men and women (mainly men) to do the fighting. Swofford tells us what some of those soldiers are like.
A FAMILY'S CURSE. His literary sensibility aside (Swofford went to war with a copy of The Iliad in his rucksack), the author is fairly typical of the kids who abound at community colleges. They grew up in small towns and nondescript subdivisions across America -- quite a few in the South (Swofford grew up in Sacramento). The number of minorities and women among the ranks is growing rapidly, but enlistees in the U.S. military are still overwhelmingly male, and (like Swofford) nearly two-thirds are white.
Many of them come from patriotic military families in which males come to feel early on (at 14 in Swofford's case) that joining the military is their inescapable destiny. Swofford's grandfather fought in World War II, his father in Vietnam, and his uncle Billy died after falling ill while serving in the Marines as an embassy guard in Denmark. Both Swofford and his brother enlisted the first chance they got.
When you read about the impact military service has had on his family, you have to wonder what compelled him to join. Swofford's father, a career Air Force man, spent 12 months building airfields in the jungles of Vietnam in 1969 and 1970 (conceiving Anthony while on leave with his wife in Honolulu). The father returned from Vietnam "only partially disturbed." By 1981, "his hands locked into fists" for reasons the doctors can never explain. His son has to fit his father's hands on the steering wheel and gearshift lever so he can drive.
UNDETERRED. At 39 and retired from the military, "the world seemed a dead, cold place, void of hope," to his father, Swofford writes. "The problems of his psyche had become manifest in his hands. With his fists he beat at the thick chest of the world, but the world ignored him. Of course the world ignored him."
And, of course, the son is undeterred. When a Marine recruiter tries to get the father to let Anthony enlist at 17, the father growls, "Tell me my son will not die in your holy f------ Marine Corps." The recruiter replies that he can't promise that, but he can promise that Anthony "will be a great killer." The father throws the recruiter out of the house, telling his son that he "knows things about the military they don't show you in brochures." Anthony enlists, anyway, as soon as he turns 18.
As much as anything, kids like Swofford seem to be looking for a place where they can grow up and belong. The seminal moment in his case came in 1984, when he saw TV reports of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 servicemen were killed. "The Marines were all sizes and colors, all dirty and exhausted and hurt, and they were men, and I was a boy falling in love with manhood. I understood that manhood had to do with war, and war with manhood, and to no longer just be a son, I needed one day to fight." He had his mother put an iron-on Marine Corps insignia on a T-shirt, which he wore while doing his newspaper route.
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Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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