Former Marine’s book goes from dust to discourse to dust - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Former Marine’s book goes from dust to discourse to dust

Benjamin Busch’s father was acclaimed novelist Frederick Busch and his mother was a librarian, but if the family liked to sit around reading Pound, you wouldn’t know it from this book.

Apparently Benjamin developed his writer’s eye and ear by osmosis or by curiosity, which is what drove him in childhood to be mesmerized by earth and mystified by battle.

He “gained comprehension of my environment by throwing myself against it, digging, cutting, climbing, stacking.”

The boy who is not allowed to have a toy gun makes one “out of a length of old pipe, wire, and a board” and is drawn to football by the armor, “the helmet and shoulder pads that shielded me in the combat of adolescence.”

This is a book of memory and of meditation, of being one with nature, philosophically and — given the title — literally. Think Emerson or Thoreau, of what “Nature” or “Walden” might be like if either had been written by a former Marine infantry officer who is an actor (Officer Anthony Colicchio in “The Wire” and Maj. Ted Eckloff in “Generation Kill”) who majored in studio art at Vassar College.

Busch might be the only Marine on record who spends “solitary hours searching for fossilized shark teeth” on Onslow Beach at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

In Iraq, his tent is in dirt where “shards of Nebuchadnezzar’s bricks lay all around us,” where “the soil and the fragments were what remained of one of the most storied cities in history.”

In an old cemetery in upstate New York, the Boy Scout observes “toppled headstones” and “emptied graves” and realizes there is no protection even in burial.

Above ground, life is hard to shake. “You invade many places in your life, you are a constant intruder, and you keep all of the places you enter.”

Life’s a beach in North Carolina and in a desert and on a hillside — and then you die. “People die with their stories every day.”

And there you have it, the point of the book: Dust to discourse to dust.