Book Review: What Was Asked of Us

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What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It. By Trish Wood. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2006. 309 pages. $25.99. Reviewed by Dr. Bruce Fleming, Professor of English, US Naval Academy.

Sometimes at the US Naval Academy I have students read a short book by journalist Chris Hedges called What Every Person Should Know About War. Hedges's book walks the reader through the before, during, and after of war, starting before enlistment and ending after you have returned. It is a series of brief answers to even more laconic questions: Will I be sexually assaulted? What does it feel like to die? Will I keep in touch with my buddies? What Was Asked of Us is like reading Hedges's book with the sound turned on. It consists of edited interviews by journalist Trish Wood with veterans of the Iraq War about what war actually was for these 29 men and (a few) women. Some of these soldiers are profane, some almost lyrical, some despondent, some hopeful. Collectively they cover the before, during, and after of their experiences in Iraq from widely varying perspectives. The variation seems part of Wood's thesis: The book is a warning against speaking for others. Everybody has a different view, she seems to say. Beware of oversimplified views (those of politicians and journalists, perhaps).

Take the "before" of these soldiers. Travis Williams, a Marine, was a self-described "outdoorsy kind of introvert" who saw a movie called Behind Enemy Lines and went the next day to the recruiter to "squelch [his] curiosity." The recruiter asked him, "Are you ready to sign up? Are you ready to be a Marine?" Williams said he would have to ask his mom. The recruiter said, "Well, you're a grown-ass man, aren't you?" Williams comments: "I'll always take [challenges], so I signed." Another, Joseph Hatcher, an Army infantryman, worked at a 7-Eleven before the war. "As I was lying there in my cot, I tried to think to myself what was the most worthless . . . job I ever had . . . and that was 7-Eleven."

That was his "before." It is also his "after." "So I came back and got my job back, and they pay me ten bucks to restock the cooler." In some cases, the after is quite different from the before. One of the relatively rare officer voices is that of surgeon Earl Hecker, who meditates, "I'm not convinced that all these guys are going to be a part of society anymore. Psychologically they'll be withdrawn because of the trauma they went through. They won't be able to play with their kids the way normal individuals [do]." He ends with a literary allusion: "Some of these people are the lost generation."

Then there is "during." Not all the voices are negative about battle. One soldier, Adrian Cavazos, speaking of comrades blown up in a suicide bombing, says: "Those men died beautifully because they died fighting for our country." Some are personal. Joseph Hatcher, the 7-Eleven man, says: "I love it. I love the fight." Others give more details, or describe the gore. Daniel Cotnoir, a Marine identified as being in "Mortuary Affairs," says: "It is gruesome to just beyond the realm of a horror film." The great majority are shocked by the blood, the heat, the killing, the chaos. Almost all are decorated soldiers; Wood lists their ribbons.

If the overall impression left by these voices is that war is individual worlds of chaos, most of these individuals persist in trying to understand the big-picture sense of what they are involved in. Alan King, an Army officer, notes that he had always been told there was a plan for reconstruction; "I would get [it] when I needed it." But when the moment comes, the commanding officer levels with him: "You know, there's no plan; you have got to come up with something in 24 hours." A military policeman stationed at Abu Ghraib, Ken Davis, comments on what happened there. "I don't believe it was just a few bad apples. I'm not that gullible. I am not going to be lied to by a government that I would have given my life for in Iraq." Few of them see a point in the war.

The overall sense the book leaves is that of people with ants'-eye views of things describing what they saw and trying desperately to understand. Thus, What Was Asked of Us makes clear the fundamental paradox of war: It is an exercise that uses individuals in a way that transcends the individual. It seems that those involved in war can never understand it as a whole because their individual experiences are so vivid, as well as being so individual. Understanding, if it is ever achieved, is left to the people who start it, to those who order it from afar, or to the historians who explain it decades later from the silence of the university. And they did not fight it.

Certainly a video-game view of war is discredited here, that it is motivational, adrenaline-pumping, rock 'em, sock 'em good guys vs. bad guys. But the kind of people who read books such as this do not need to have this view discredited; they do not believe it to begin with. The view that it is only unpatriotic liberals who would question the war bites the dust too; one soldier, Garret Reppenhaben, mocks the "Support the Troops" magnetic ribbons by saying they "begin to look like swastikas."

This much of a polemical point is, at least, clear: Through its meticulous re-creation of these voices, What Was Asked of Us opposes a view of war as something we should engage in because it will feel good for a moment to have the sense we are "doing something." We should, it is clear, resist saying, "They did X to us, so let's 'take the war to them.'" This book reminds us vividly that it is always people who take war anywhere, and people to whom it is taken. It is a point that we who theorize about war forget only at our peril.

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