Iraq and Afghanistan veterans turning-in rifles for pens and typewriters

One of my old high school classmates beat me to the punch and posted a link on Facebook to this article from yesteday's NYT about the recent wave of writing (memoirs, analytical studies, etc.) emerging from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's a short article, so I won't waste time giving you an executive summary.  Instead, I'll talk about what struck me.  In particular was this paragraph from the article written by Elisabeth Bumiller, characterizing today's "soldier-writers":

The current group is different. As part of a modern all-volunteer force, they explore the timeless theme of the futility of war — but wars that they for the most part support. The books, many written as rites of passage by members of a highly educated young officer corps, are filled with gore, inept commanders and anguish over men lost in combat, but not questions about the conflicts themselves. “They look at war as an aspect of glory, of finding honor,” said Mr. O’Brien, who was drafted for Vietnam in 1968 out of Macalester College in St. Paul. “It’s almost an old-fashioned, Victorian way of looking at war.”

That's a hell of a paragraph, dripping with consequence for my fellow comrades-in-arms who dare look inwards and confront their inner drive and motivation.  So I ask myself: have I been seduced by the magnetic charm of the warrior-scholar paradigm?  Hell, we've got Tim O'Brien himself here, saying that "we look at war as an aspect of glory, of finding honor."

My God...is that what I'm doing?

I spent a childhood growing up on a healthy dose of Vietnam movies and memoirs and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, which I truly believe left a huge impression on me as a young high school student back in the '90s.  With this pedigree of social commentary under my belt, any implication that I see war as a mechanism to find glory and honor would be downright embarrassing.  I mean shit, who wants to admit that?  Who wants to stand up, raise their hand and say, "Yes, I joined the military because I'm looking for glory."

But wait, let's pause for a second.  Maybe Ms. Bumiller and Tim O'Brien are onto something here.  And let's face it: Tim O'Brien's a hell of an insightful guy (just read his books).

As I was reading the article, I couldn't help but feel that someone had been spying on me, and sent a report to the Times.  Caught in the act!  Or maybe, more accurately, I want the article to remind me of...well, myself.

I mean, isn't that why I'm even posting to this blog in the first place?  Yes, part of it is cathartic like I imagine it is for plenty of service members who write memoirs about their wartime experiences -- to help myself work through some of the things that I've seen and done for the last couple of years in the Army.  But isn't a part of it also because I have indeed been seduced by the warrior-scholar paradigm?  And if I have, the question then is: is that a bad thing?

Don't worry, I'm not comparing myself to guys like Nate Fick or Andrew Exum -- guys that went to war, wrote books, then went on to go to the best schools in America and are currently doing amazing things as civilians; guys that are just downright geniuses.  These guys are intellectual heavyweights with wartime credentials that outdo mine by a thousand-fold, and unless I do some amazing shit when World War III pops off, there's no danger of my joining their ranks in the warrior-scholar elite.

Maybe I write because I want to break that age-old stereotype: the one of the soldier as an apish brute.  Maybe I want to prove that just because I put on a camouflage uniform does not mean that I am unintelligent or incapable of understanding issues of larger import or gravitas than what the chow hall is serving for the next meal.  Maybe I want to prove to mainstream America that I understand the national and global policy issues behind the wars that are killing my soldiers better than they do, because I don't shackle myself to 60-second sound-bites from a spin-doctor on Fox News.  Maybe I want to show people that there's more to the military than the whole "Kill!  Kill!  Kill!  Death!  Blood!  Yeah!  Awesome!" visage that is so often paraded around and exploited by anyone with an agenda in their pocket.

I don't know.  I'm just glad that GWOT (Global War on Terrorism -- yeah, it's a Bushism, but one acronymn is better than two separate ones: OIF and OEF) veterans are writing, and that some works are being recognized.  Hell, exposure in this Times article is probably as mainstream as some of these works will ever get, but if that means more people wander over into the Military History section of their local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and pick up Colby Buzzell's My War or Andrew Exum's This Man's Army or hell, even James McDonough's Vietnam memoir, Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat...well, then that's a good thing.