Sherry Chandler

A well-documented war?

A chilling segment on Morning Edition today about a number of military memoirs being produced by Iraqi war veterans at all levels of service.

What’s striking, says Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks, is that some of the most compelling stories are coming from soldiers in the lower ranks, not the generals — whose books he calls “snoozers.”

Ricks, who has written his own book about the Iraq war, Fiasco, offers his reviews of some of the latest titles.

“The books by the young enlisted, the young officers, are revealing. They’re honest, they’re tough,” Ricks tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “They’re real page-turners.”

Conversely, Ricks says the memoirs from the generals indicate that they don’t understand the war they’re in. The combat veterans can only understand combat but we should be able to look to the generals for an understanding of the war. As examples, Ricks sites Ulysses Grant’s civil war memoir and Field Marshall Slim’s account of fighting the Japanese in the Burma. The books from the Iraqi war generals, he says, are “as much intended to cover up as to reveal.”

The memoirs include one by a woman warrior, Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More than You. I’ll have to give her big points for a provocative, evocative title.

Williams recounts sitting on a hilltop with her fellow soldiers, bored out of their minds. The men in the group say they’ve scrounged together $87 and a bag of M&Ms for her if she’ll take off her shirt. Williams is heartbroken by the incident, Ricks says

The heartbreak is because they’re offering her money for a thing she would have done for free. The offer of money made her male fellow-soldiers contemptuous in her eyes.

Mr. Ricks’s comment on David Bellavia’s House to House was sobering:

“He is extremely good at combat, but he feels beyond redemption,” Ricks says. “At one point, in house-to-house fighting in Fallujah, he asked himself, ‘Am I in hell?’ And the answer really is, ‘Yes, you are.’”

This is what we are asking of our young men and women, that they put themselves beyond redemption for us, that they put not only their lives but also their souls at risk. Such sacrifice should not be asked lightly or taken as a matter of course.

Streaming audio and selections from the various books are available at the NPR site.

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