Colby Buzzell: My War: Killing Time in Iraq

[mehastings]

I read an article about this book winning the Lulu Blooker Prize (yes, that Lulu) earlier this month and I was intrigued. I noticed a copy of it at the bookstore and decided to pick it up. I'm just starting it now, but I thought I'd throw it out there to see if anyone else has read it.

Amazon.com
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.

 

[mehastings]

In the end, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. The writing was far better than I had anticipated, and I found myself getting drawn into Iraq, wondering what the author did next. I was a tad surprised at the excessive drinking prior to the author's deployment and constant smoking throughout the book. I suppose I had this skewed vision that life in the Army would involve more discipline and order than it really did. I was also surprised by the amenities available to soldiers in Iraq. I've always been under the understanding that they're all out in tents in the dessert wishing and hoping some family member will send them a book and a box of band aids. It would seem that entertainment and personal supplies are readily available, at least at FOB Maraz.

I did have a few minor complaints about this book. The first was that I thought that the majority of the content would be entries from the author's blog. This, was not the case. Blog entries made up maybe twenty percent of the book, and the rest was stuff the author wrote later on. The information was still interesting, but it wasn't in the format I expected. My other complaint is that that Buzzell seems a tad naive (or perhaps intentionally blind) in his descriptions of how Iraqis in general felt about American forces. He writes off incidents involving an angry rock throwing mob, children who only loved Americans if they were getting a handout and the overall feeling of unease many Iraqis seemed to have in his presence. I have to wonder if he would be able to do the same if he was in Iraq now, rather than during the long past "honeymoon period" during which, Saddam Hussein was captured.

Overall, I would recommend this book for anyone interested in an inside look at an Army infantry unit at war. Be prepared a one sided (and already dated) account filled with profanity and use of a racist term to describe Iraqis.

 

[arnuld]

Thanks for the review, I have added the book to my Non-Fiction list .