Book of the Week: Lost in America by Colby Buzzell

Book of the Week was Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey by Colby Buzzell.  Buzzell is a former milblogger of My War: Killing Time in Iraq fame.  Overall, an interesting read.  A road memoir that pays homage to Kerouac, Buzzell paints a picture of every day America in tough economic times.  He also chronicles an inner journey towards peace and purpose as he navigates post-war existence, the loss of his mother, and his new introduction to fatherhood.

I empathize with this journey.  Making your way in a world where the opportunities you were promised have come and gone already.  Where purpose and meaning have come inextricably interwoven with war.   Where there is little direction for your life so you just keeping moving, keep stepping forward, hoping to stumble upon the place where lost becomes found.

The Junior Officer's Reading Club- Patrick Hennessey

I knocked out Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officer's Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars in 2 day. Couldn't put it down. I think it could be fairly described as the British counterpart to Craig Mulanney's The Unforgiving Minute.

There was so much I loved about this book, from his humor to his battlefield descriptions peppered with pop culture and classic references. He tells a captivating story about the journey through young adulthood with stops along the way at Sandhurst, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

He talks a lot about his time as a trainer of Afghan forces and the connections he makes to those men and their officers. I think sometimes we forget when we talk about the wars and standing up an army or the deaths of Afghan soldiers that they are brothers in arms as well. Those that stand and fight forge bonds with our military men and British allies. Sometimes I think we underestimate that bond.

I am also fascinated by points in his story where the war and the outside world combine. A lot of people are so numb and/or ignorant of events that I always find it interesting when they are jolted out of their complacency.

The best example of this is a story in which Hennessey relates the aftermath of an attack and the evacuation of casualties:

The Chinook which comes thundering into the hastily prepared landing site turns out not to be the air ambulance but a diverted R & R flight, and I'll never forget the look of horror on the face of the young, possibly pretty journalist who's sitting in the back in gimpy blue helmet, unsure why her flight home has just dropped into the Green Zone, where the air is still a-rattle with fire form the ANA on the cordon, when suddenly the reality of Helmand charges on to her lap as four sweating, swearing, emotional soldiers drop a bleeding, naked, morphine-babbling black man on her brand new hiking boots.

I find myself wondering what her side of that story is. What did she take away from that experience? What were her thoughts and emotions? Did it change the way she reported on the war? Did it change her reactions, emotions, and relationships to soldiers? Did she see war in general with new eyes?

There probably are no answers to these questions but I think they are important to ask anyway. What do we do with the war when its realities are brought home? How do those realities fundamentally change us?

Those are questions I've thought about for a long time. I still don't have answers for them.

But I love this book for sparking my interest in searching for them again.

Where War Lives: A Photographic Journal of Vietnam

I've been reading Where War Lives: A Photographic Journal of Vietnam by Dick Durrance. It is a collection of his photographs during his military service accompanied by an introduction by Ron Kovic of Born on the 4th of July fame.

The Vietnam war is, in many ways, the military history I grew up on. Stories from Vietnam were told by relatives who served, passed down in family legend. Its pictures, patches, and maps covered the walls of the VFW where we had so many family gatherings.

Yet its jungles and aging warriors seem far removed after so many years of the wars that have become my own.

Through Durrance's photographic journey of his service, I am reminded once again of the commonalities of war and of the men and women who fight them.

A war is a war is a war. A warrior is a warrior is a warrior.

The future photojournalist captures the humanity of his compatriots. In the black and white photographs of training I can see Bestie and a hundred friends reflected in the bearing and attitude of young men now thirty-plus years their senior.

Take the trees out of his helo shots and the door gunner could be the one that sits in my hard drive, flying over an entirely different battlefield.

Flipping through the photographs, I am drawn to their eyes. Eyes that reflect too many hours without a decent sleep. Young men burdened with the weight too much gear and too many memories. Eyes with a certain hardness and sureness of attitude.

I have seen these eyes before. I will see them again soon.

I find it interesting that Dick Durrance waited twenty years after he left Vietnam to publish this book. I wonder what we will learn about our wars and from our warriors in twenty years.

"Nothing can repair the damage caused by war, but returning to the memories and pictures has connected me to those experiences, which, in spite of my efforts to ignore them, have done so much to shape the rest of my life (143)." ~Dick Durrance

The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War

I just finished David Laskin's book The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War.

Laskin tells the story of America's involvement in the Great War through the stories of 12 men who immigrated to the United States not long before the conflict began. It is a perspective that we don't hear enough about when learning about that war. It is easy to forget how the nation was still being formed and molded into what we know it as today. Laskin illustrates how immigrant experience cannot be untangled from America's experience in the war.

I enjoyed how he weaved the stories of these men together with their place in their family histories as well as the greater American history. He clearly shows how the draft brought together all these men of different nationalities, ethnicities, and histories who before did not interact with those outside of their neighborhoods or enclaves. The war takes these men and makes them suffer together, bleed together, and die together until their differences are less important than their commonality as soldiers. Post-war Laskin shows that this did more for integrating immigrants into America long term than perhaps anything else.

In the words of their relatives these men "came home American." Most were proud of their service and it was a touchstone throughout their lives. For many, that legacy of military service continued in their families and still continues through the wars we fight today.

Great read that further illustrates that suffering in war is the same kind of hell be it in Ypres, Normandy, Chosin, Khe Sahn, Kuwait, Fallujah, or Marjah. It always leaves its mark, both positive and negative, on the men, women, and families it touches.