A Word-Blackened Soul

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading over the past week, and in that time I’ve torn through 3 separate books…two non-fiction, one fiction. Each one of them was a great read…well, two were great, one was a decent follow up. I would (and do) recommend any and all of them to anybody bored enough to be reading this post.

And every one of them splattered a little gloom gloss on whatever girly piece of my insides it is that produces those ‘feelings’ things.

First up was a book called House to House : A Soldier’s Memoir. Written by David Bellavia, a retired Army serviceman, it’s his account of the rather brutal fighting in Fallujah in late 2004. Along the same lines as many of the soldier blogs I frequently read, what I liked about the book was its completely unflinching look at combat. This guy doesn’t hold anything back…ANYTHING. I’ll copy out an example from the book (a quick description…the unit is under fire. They bust in to a home and find a bunch of scared women and kids. They also  find a room filled with guns still hot from being fired and a group of Iraqi men stinking of gunpowder and laughing. They have to keep advancing, but can’t leave them alone for fear of being shot in the back, so they flex-cuff them to the gate out front of the house. They have managed to free themselves and several have met a swift and explosive end thanks to the 25mm. turret on a Bradley fighting vehicle. Then the last is accidentally shot in the gut by one of his fellow insurgents) :

Writhing in pain he began to scream only feet from his own house. His family heard him, and two sobbing children came out to see what had become of their father. I tossed a smoke grenade that scattered the children back to the safety of their home. I did it to keep the kids from being harmed, but also to deny their father a chance to say good bye. My brothers who died ion the field got no such opportunity to say good bye to those they loved, and I will afford none to this man. I wanted him to die alone, shrouded in smoke, choking on his own blood.

Their father, utterly despondent, stared at me with pleading eyes as the white smoke filled the air around him. He died without another chance to see his children. I robbed him of his final earthly joy. I delighted as I watched his life ebb away. It felt just.

What have I become???

Later, while storming a house full of insurgents hopped up on so many amphetamines and painkillers that they don’t really stop coming until they bleed to death, he gets in to a hand to hand fight with one of them. Over seven or eight pages of the most brutal text that I have ever read, the whole thing plays out…and as horrifying as it is, it’s also rather disturbingly compelling. I don’t know what it says that I found it to be a very page turning experience reading about two guys quite literally fighting to the death.

Even later, he talks about how to this day, he is STILL racked with guilt every time one of the guys from his unit dies…he can’t shake the feeling that he should have been there to help, and maybe if he had been that guy would still be alive. He talks quite openly about how he’s not sure he’ll ever manage to actually be a decent husband or father or human being for that matter. The book works because he’s able to shine the klieg lights down on himself and be almost painfully honest about what he finds.

So, what to follow that up with? Well, let’s read We Are Soldiers Still. Written by Joe Galloway and Retired General Harold Moore, it’s the follow up to We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, a book that is quite simply the single best written experience of combat that I have EVER read, and what the movie We Were Soldiers was more or less based on. This one finds the two of them, plus many other veterans of the battles in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, returning to Vietnam. To say that many of them are still haunted by what happened there would be an epic understatement.

What worked so well about the first book was that the NVA weren’t treated as some collection of demonic monsters as they are in so many other books dealing with the Vietnam War. They were treated as the human beings they were, and in fact many of their stories were also included in the book. The same is true of the follow up. Several North Vietnamese commanders from those battles were included in the group that returned. In some cases, they and their American comrades found a common ground. In some cases, they grew to like each other. In others, the hate never went away.

This one wasn’t as good as the first, but it was a nice follow up piece that at least served to remind that while countries may just be able to declare “Okay, war’s over, let’s move on.”, the guys who actually fight those wars often cannot flip the page on what they’ve seen/done/experienced so easily.

Well hey, that was actually a bit poignant and my will to live is returning! My next book choice would be key. I chose The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I actually bought this book on a lark…it was sitting literally next to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies on the shelf and I know it was the basis of an upcoming movie, so I figured what the Hell and snagged it at as well.

  Welcome to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be called Earth! We hope you enjoy your stay trying to cling to whatever semblance of what you might call life is like in this ash covered expanse of nothingness and used to be. This book won a Pulitzer Prize, and deservingly so…it truly is an amazing piece of writing. It also sort of takes your will to live and shreds it.

The last time I remember enjoying something and being so depressed by it all at once was when James and I went and saw Downfall in an indie theatre in Edmonton when it first came out. It’s the story of the last days of the 3rd Reich within the confines of the underground Fuhrer Bunker. Bruno Ganz gives an amazing performance as Adolf in his final days (the fact that he wasn’t so much as fucking NOMINATED for an award was simply the final proving point in the argument that awards shows are a load of shit)…even if you haven’t seen the movie, I guarantee you you’ve seen one of the thousands of versions of his fit in the bunker, screaming at his Generals, only it’s been changed in to an excoriation of a sports team, or a video game, or something else unrelated with humorous new captions to match the theme.

It was an incredible film, but it also left me feeling a bit hollow. Sure I knew it was going to happen, but actually WATCHING a realistic portrayal of the Goebbels’ poisoning their children kind of bleeds your soul a bit.

This book is similar. Of course a post-apocalyptic world would be filled with pain and torment and the tortuous question of what the fuck you’re even bothering to carry on for…but actually reading it written as well as it is here is painful. Painfully GOOD, but painful. I’m hoping the movie is just as Good-Bad (incidentally, having read the book I think the casting of Viggo Mortensen in the lead is pretty much fucking perfection).

So there you go, three books I’d recommend…just maybe slide something funny in between them. I’m going to go drink. A lot.