Pages of war: Professor pulls together stories of Iraq combat to find common threads - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Pages of war: Professor pulls together stories of Iraq combat to find common threads

The title is uninspired, but this book about books about Iraq is insightful.

Nearly 10 years into two current U.S. wars, a University of North Carolina at Greensboro professor notes the cultural resonance of seven published titles — plus some movies — in a detailed study of the literature of the fight.

All are “prominent” works in which “the thwarted desire for transcendence that they represent is such a powerful and poignant part of the stories they tell.”

What transcendental bond do the personal stories share as art? The writers of war are “politically cynical but personally idealistic” and “feel betrayed ... by the personal resources they expect to carry them through.”

What follows are Peebles’ choices, all but two published in 2005:

• Jarhead by Anthony Swofford (2003). In the Persian Gulf War, “Swofford’s attempted identification with the violent, seductive images that enraptured him fails.”

• My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell. Buzzell dismisses his service “as something to be survived and then forgotten, but the story of that service becomes a space of rich and emotional content for many others.”

• Baghdad Express by Joel Turnipseed (2003). “A self-portrait from a man whose idea of identity was either fractured or self-consciously playful long before he was faced with the gauntlet of [the Gulf] war.”

• One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel Fick. Fick conveys that the “the hardness that draws his masculine community together cannot forge in him a willingness to sacrifice that community.”

• Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army by Kayla Williams. “Despite her proper performance of masculinity, she is still considered an object, a girl.”

• The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell by John Crawford. This book — on my list of top military books of the decade — “doesn’t quite work” and is “raw and unapologetically racist.”

• Here, Bullet by Brian Turner. “If Crawford takes in nothing in Iraq and empties himself out until he is a hollow shell, Turner takes in so much that he is full to bursting.” His poetry has a “chance to become a classic.”

From 2007, Peebles points to HBO’s documentary “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq” and “In the Valley of Elah,” which regrettably few moviegoers saw. Both visualize the “difficulties of healing minds and bodies that have been fragmented by war.” Best Picture-winning “The Hurt Locker” (2009) illustrates “innocence destroyed by the chaos of a war that will linger in the consciousness of the soldiers” — and will live vicariously in the rest of us because of Peebles’ picks and others.