I’ve never been a soldier, and I’ve never wanted to be a
soldier. I was a staunch pacifist beginning in my teens, though I modified that
later when I read more about the history of the Second World War. But WWII
remains, for me, the single war of the twentieth century and the first part of
the twenty-first that I think was justifiable, worth fighting, and that I would
have volunteered for. Every other war – at least, the wars initiated by
European and American governments – I believe to be absolutely unjustifiable in
terms of a direct threat to the security of the nation, and that they were
started for mainly political and ideological reasons rather than as a response
to the sort of existential threat posed by the Nazis.
I hold these beliefs despite the fact that both my parents
were in the British Army in the 1960s, and that many of my memories from my
first five years of life are of army bases, military housing, a father in
uniform. In other words, I have contradictory impulses on the subject of
warmaking and soldiering, further evidenced by the fact that I’ve always been an
eager reader of written accounts of war. I read The Iliad for the first time
when I was 14, for example. My interest at that age was probably to do with
these ancient tales as adventure stories, plus a teenage boy’s bloodthirsty
enjoyment of the staggeringly high body count and the minute detail they contained
of dismemberments, disembowellings, beheadings, spear piercings, etc. Funny how
political beliefs are no match for testosterone in the male teenage body.
A high school teacher introduced me to the war poems of
Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen. From there I went on to immerse myself in
writing about WWI. I can still recall being mesmerized by Robert Graves’ “Goodbye
to All That,” and the immense power of a kind of writing that was suffused with
sorrow, anger, and reproach only just held in check, as if his aristocratic
eloquence and British reserve were about to burst their bounds at any moment. The
same with All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernest Hemingway’s war fiction,
and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. War as adventure, war as terror, war as dirt
and grime and death, war as individual acts of heroism painted against a wide
backdrop of futility and betrayal. All of these men (and they were all men, of
course) came from a generation and a long tradition that believed it was their
duty to go to war, and even though they were damaged and scarred by their
experience, both physically and mentally, they knew that they had undergone the
largest experience of their lives.
All of the above is a lengthy way of getting round to
talking about a book I read last week, called Kaboom, by Matt Gallagher. It’s a
memoir of his time serving in Iraq as an officer in the US Army Rangers and the
Infantry, in 2008 and 2009. I met the author just a few days before I read the
book, while we were both teaching adult classes at Interlochen. That might be
the main reason I picked up the book (though I hope I would have come to it
sooner or later), but I’m glad I did. I started reading it on a Thursday
evening, and then read the whole thing on the following day. And when I say “read,”
I mean “grabbed by the neck and pulled headlong through the narrative with
barely any bathroom breaks.” It arrests you from the very first page, and doesn’t
let you go until the end. The sense of scene, characterization, dialogue, are
incredibly sharp, and Gallagher is so good at putting you right there in the
field with him that sometimes you forget how good the writing is, and you feel
that the events are just unfolding right in front of your eyes.
Whatever your
feelings about war in general, and the American invasion of Iraq in particular,
Kaboom is a vivid, funny, and extremely humane account of how that period was
experienced by the soldiers on the ground. As Gallagher says, only those who
were there can truly know what it was like to go through it – a point that is
frequently made, implicitly and explicitly, by his illustrious writer-soldier
forebears. But like Robert Graves, and T.E. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway, and
George Orwell, and Tim O’Brien, reading Gallagher is the next best thing.
Kaboom absolutely belongs on the same shelf as those men’s books.