NEW YORK, 24 September 2005 — Journalists, generals, historians, Iraqis and a former hostage have told their stories about Iraq, but now more than two years after American troops invaded, the flood of books by US soldiers has arrived. From Roman emperor Julius Caesar to World War I poets, soldiers have written books, poems, diaries and letters home.
But with titles like “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell” and “Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army,” the latest crop of books offers a more immediate picture of a soldier’s wartime life than ever before. Two books that will be published in October began as blogs — Internet diaries of writers in Iraq that by their very immediacy can lack the perspective that comes with time.
“If I had to write this book today, from scratch, it would probably be a completely different book,” said Jason Christopher Hartley, whose book “Just Another Soldier” (to be published on Oct. 4 from HarperCollins) was built around a blog of the same name.
“The military wasn’t a big fan of it,” said Hartley, who was ordered to take down the blog and was confined to base toward the end of his deployment to Iraq with the National Guard. Hartley describes such unsavory topics as burning excrement to get rid of it, soldiers lusting after their female colleagues, etc. — perhaps giving a view of the military that his commanding officers would have preferred not be documented. But he also addresses ethical dilemmas such as that posed by the high number of civilian casualties of the war.
He describes how he stewed for weeks over an incident in which US troops mistakenly opened fire on a truck carrying a family of Iraqis, killing a man, two women and a 3-year-old girl. Hartley said his editors were worried that readers might not understand the “gallows humor” used commonly by soldiers to cope with tragedy.
“It’s like ‘Hey we wasted a whole family today.’ ‘Oh, that’s awesome.’ ‘Oh there was a 3-year-old girl.’ ‘That’s awesome.’ Because it was horrific.” Sitting in an ambush position on Sept. 11, 2004, he remembers responding with the National Guard to the World Trade Center attacks three years earlier, and he muses on his role. “I am not a pacifist nor am I a conscientious objector, but I believe there must be a way to be an infantryman and still be able to preserve a sense of compassion,” he writes.
“I have tried my best to be honest with myself about my apparently instinctual desire to fight and commit violence, but I also feel unafraid to express my innate desire to bring comfort to those around me.”
Colby Buzzell recalls in “My War: Killing Time in Iraq” (published on Oct. 20 by Putnam) how a recruiter gave him tips on passing a drugs test to enter the military. Like Hartley, he is candid about soldiers’ reactions to war: “I’ve developed that really disturbing, warped, sick war humor about everything,” he writes in an August 2004 blog entry which appears in his book, describing how a gruesome photograph of a dead Iraqi prompted laughter.
His book also juxtaposes his own confused account of a dramatic clash with insurgents in Mosul with a CNN report and a military statement about the same event — the latter both dry and with no hint of the severity and extent of the fighting. “It kinda made me wonder what else goes on here in Iraq that never gets reported to the people back home,” he writes.
Buzzell said he was never punished for what he wrote, though he was “counseled” several times, and he made a point of changing names and details to avoid endangering other US forces by giving away their tactics or location. “A lot of my chain of command had never even heard of a blog,” Buzzell told Reuters. “They were a little nervous about it ... they didn’t know quite how to handle it.”
John Crawford, author of “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell,” (Riverhead) attributes the spate of Iraq books by soldiers to the Internet and a better educated military.
“There’s also the change in gender roles, that men are more comfortable with telling how they feel and saying ‘Oh, I was scared. This was terrible,’ whereas 50 or 100 years ago you would never have got that,” Crawford said.
Buzzell said going to Iraq was the best thing he had ever done. “I do believe we were doing a lot of good but ... I have a lot of questions about what we’re doing,” he said. Some of the books reveal more bitterness.
“People are saying ‘Why are these memoirs so angry and hostile’?” Crawford said. “It’s because they’re right now. You can’t write a pro-war book and you can’t write a happy story.” “If you tell the truth and you’re in the war, it’s going to be a very bleak picture.”