As my blog’s vast legion of readers will know, this blog isn’t exactly high volume. I’d rather let my work speak for itself rather than publish every aspect of its development and my dietary habits while writing it. My Twitter followers and Facebook friends will know that I like to broadcast wordcounts, but that’s about it. By contrast, I have no qualms about gushing about my woodworking projects, but since I’ve been focused almost exclusively on my new book lately there hasn’t been much of that in recent months. Then it occured to me that what I can do is blog about what I’m reading instead of what I’m writing. So, we’ll try that for a while and see if it sticks…
My current work in progress, Far From the War, concerns a modern military conflict. To get a better feel for the modern armed forces, I’ve been doing a fair amount of research. One small part of this research was to read Generation Kill by Evan Wright. I’d seen the HBO mini-series, so I was prepped going in for a lot of it. Even so, I’m a sucker for details (one of my favorite non-fiction books is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, which is a detail lover’s paradise), so I expected to get much more out of the book than I did out of the mini-series. I wasn’t disappointed.
A small distraction, both when I watched the mini-series and when reading the book, was that I actually know one of the people in it. Rudy Reyes, known as “Fruity Rudy” in the book (and who recently published his own book, a memoir of sorts called Hero Living), actually attended the same high school as I did. I didn’t really know him very well, still don’t. We were in a high school production of South Pacific together and that’s about it. All I remember about him from high school was that he removed his shirt at every opportunity. From reading Generation Kill, it seems like this habit has endured.
Anyway, Generation Kill is a compelling work of non-fiction that covers Rolling Stone Reporter Evan Wright’s experiences while embedded with a Marine Recon unit during the invasion of Iraq. Wright’s prose clips along nicely and keeps you engaged. I haven’t read of a lot of stuff — at least not recently — written in present tense, so it was edifying to see that style used effectively.
As I read the book, two general impressions took hold. The first was the indiscriminate killing of civilians. We’re fed a lot of stuff about surgical strikes, smart bombs and what-have-you, and I have no doubt that this technology saves a lot of lives. But it doesn’t save all the lives. The vast majority of civilians killed in Iraq were not killed intentionally. They were not executed. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Generation Kill, Wright talks of seeing headless civilians, dead children and unimaginable gore everywhere, often with dogs dining on the corpses. It’s unrelenting and hard to believe. If it weren’t non-fiction, you’d be tempted to dismiss it as gratuitous hyperbole. As I considered how I’m going to depict this kind of violence in Far From the War, I realized that there’s not much I could conceive of, no level of pathos or gore that would be unrealistic. In fact, I felt a distinct need to understate the level of violence and gore in order to make it believable. I’m just not sure readers would take a realistic depiction of warfare as credible fiction.
The second major impression I drew from the book concerns the incompetence of officers, particularly two officers referred to in the book as Encino Man and Captain America. (Lt. Fick is a notable exception.) There are stories about Captain America bayonetting prisoners and generally freaking out as though he were acting out scenes from old war movies instead of actually participating in one. As a veteran of the armed forces myself, I personally think that if the military expects enlisted men to obey orders without a moment’s hesitation, they owe the enlisted men leaders worthy of their respect. When I read that Captain America was returned to command after being suspended several times for what amount to light war crimes and gross incompetence, I began to wonder whether or not Marine Corps officers are as elite as we’d all like to believe. Don’t get me wrong. I support the military, but anybody in a position to order people to their deaths has to be held to a higher standard. If standards aren’t enforced, they become more like guidelines. When that happens, mediocrity is sure to follow.
Overall, I think the book underscores how clueless the average American is about what these guys go through over there. We really haven’t a clue. I’ve been pretty down on “kids these days” who I’ve often derided as unproductive video game addicted buffoons doing everything they can to destroy our GDP from the comfort of their Futons. The Marines depicted in Generation Kill and by extension everyone serving in Iraq (and Afghanistan) go through things every day we couldn’t possibly imagine. We’re basically a bunch of whiny clueless lightweights compared to these guys. The contrast between these guys and the people sitting at home eating Doritos and playing Guitar Hero is striking. It makes you all the more disgusted at the idle man-boys, but at least grateful to know that they aren’t the whole picture.
The grill in use.
So there you go. No more parties or projects for at least a month or so. Once I get the final draft of The Wavy Line out the door, I might consider a walnut coffee table. Stay tuned.
Here you can see many deck blocks and more framing…
Here we stand atop the completed frame…
Here the decking is almost complete…
And now we’re all done…
As it turns out, my mother is a little miffed that I didn’t develop a penchant for this stuff until relocation to Seattle. I don’t know what to tell her other than buying a house must have activated some latent manliness genes.
