Apostrophe S

I’ve never claimed any love for the military. In some ways, I despise that militaries are a necessity in this modern world. On the other hand, a consistent percentage of every generation of humans grow up to be warriors, so obviously they need an outlet.

I also have a morbid fascination with soldiers and soldiering. I believe conflict can and has inspired the majority of art that matters. I’ve quoted this before, but I believe what Orson Welle’s character in The Third Man said is relavent:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

That’s not to say that I believe all wars are good, or even that most wars are good. In fact, I believe most wars are bad. Powered by evil and greedy intentions. I loathe the fact that the warmakers are not the warriors. But some warriors return from the battlefield with powerful tales of both hope and hopelessness, and I can’t help myself for respecting and even admiring their literary accomplishments. Ernie Pyle, Tim O’Brien and now Anthony Swofford.

I read Jarhead partly in anticipation of the upcoming film adaptation — directed by Sam Mendes of American Beauty fame and set to be released in November — and partly because I was drawn in by an excerpt of the memoir I read for a class on the history of war in Vietnam. (We were talking about combat and the legacy of Vietnam.) But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Jarhead is Swofford’s memoir of being a Marine who fought in the brief but undeniably important ground battle during Desert Storm. He was a member of the Sniper/Target Acquisition platoon (called STA and pronounced “stay”). As such, he was still a rotten, drunken whoring grunt, but was also a member of a more elite outfit. Don’t take that to mean that he liked he. He, and many other Marines, refer to the Corps as “the Suck,” and the book explains why this is for good reason, so I won’t elaborate here.

The book is subtitled “A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.” In my opinion, most of the other battles are the ones Swofford fought in his own mind, between what he thought he was supposed to do with his life and what he later decided was a bad idea.

He’s not exactly ashamed of what he was involved with, but he’s not proud of it, either. He was was a frightened, angry and proud youth, and his retellings of combat and of the soldiering life are positively O’Brienian:

We are not only better equiped but we seem also to have the combat luck, an abstract currency you can neither buy nor steal but that you might lose if you’re not careful and grateful. #

In the end, Swofford speaks out against the war he fought in and the price paid by Americans like him. He acknowledges the real reasons he and others were sent to fight and maybe die in what he calls “the Desert.”

…because the war has been mine to fight but not mine to win or lose, and I know that none of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, not on the field of battle, not for the man who fights the battle — the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street, and Kuwait City. #

And although he doesn’t say specifically, I get the impression he didn’t care much for the Commander in Chief at the time, nor is it likely he cares for the Commander in Chief now. He mourns the loss of life and loss of innocence of those who go to war, and discredits those who celebrate false heroism and patriotism. He blames those in the military who never fought for the ease with which they are willing to send your children off to fight for questionable causes.

…I’m sorry the men are dead, for many reasons I am sorry, and chief among my reasons is that the men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom, and the more men who survive the war, the higher the number of men who might speak.

Unfortunately, many of the men who live though the war don’t understand why they were spared. They think they are still alive in order to return home and make money and fuck their wife and get drunk and wave the flag.

These men spread what they call good news, the good news about war and warriors. Some of the men who spread good news have never fought — so what could they have to say about the purity of war and warriors? These men are liars and cheats and they gamble with your freedom and your life and the lives of your sons and daughters and the reputation of your country. #

These excerpts mostly speak for themselves, so I won’t crowd them with an overabundance of my words, words which come from a mouth that has never tasted the sand of the Desert, words which are typed with fingers that have never pulled the trigger of a .50 caliber sniper rifle, words thought up by a brain that has never been in combat.

I recommend this book.

I’ve been reading this book on and off for about the last year or so. (This is the last of the half-read books I have lying around, at least the ones that I want to finish. Now I can move on to new stuff.) I don’t generally believe in regret, but if there’s one thing I’ll always wish I had done, it would be to meet Johnny Cash before he died. He’s one of my heroes, especially after reading his book.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would have been like to sit down with a cup of coffee and talk with Cash about his life, this book is for you. He writes his life story conversationally, and not in any particular chronological order. The book is divided up into sections written at the different places he calls home.

The book is more memoir than autobiography. Sure, Cash spends plenty of time revealing his life’s story, where he came from, the circustances of his rise to fame, etc. But the real bulk of the book is Cash talking about all the people he’s known and worked with throughout the years. And there are plenty. I never realized how many people the Man in Black knew.

One of the things I really appreciate about the book is Cash’s humble attitude about himself and his realization of his own mortality and his slowly aging body.

Not that I believe you have to “grow old gracefully.” I go along with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s idea that it’s okay to go out screaming and scratching and fighting. When death starts beating the door down, you need to be reaching for your shotgun. #

The life of Johnny Cash is a true American story. I don’t even say success story, because he was successful on and off throughout his 40-plus-year career. He wasn’t even always a good man, as he will readily admit. He spent many years addicted to pills and senseless violence, such as trashing hotel rooms. But he seems to have calmed and wisened as he aged, and has thankfully been able to write a few things down.

Cash is a classic American troubadour, and his influence on the world of music won’t soon be forgotten.

I also have The Man Called CASH : The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend, a straight biography, which I hope to read soon. However, I’ll probably come back to that after I read a few other books.

The upcoming movie

There’s an upcoming biopic about Johnny Cash’s life called “Walk the Line”. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as the Man in Black and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash. From the trailer, it appears the focus of the movie will be Cash’s rise to stardom and roudy lifestyle, mixed with a love story between he and June Carter. This is fine by me, but I hope they at least acknowledge the man Cash became in his later years, the man who had the wisdom and talent to write a best-selling autobiography.

Phoenix is an unusual but as far as I can tell excellent choice for the part. He even sings in his own voice for the music in the film, if the trailer can be trusted. Now, this sometimes works. (Not so much in that Bobby Darin movie.) I hope that this is one of those times, because if they screw this movie up, I’m not going to be happy.

I really hope it’s better than “Ray,” which just wasn’t a good enough movie for how good Jamie Foxx played the title character.

I’ll close with some words of wisdom from the man himself.

It’s about time for me to go to work, or if you like, to go play. That’s what we music gypsies call it, after all. I’ll put on my black shirt, buckle up the black belt on my black pants, tie my black shoes, pick up my black guitar, and go put on a show for the people in this town.

Much like Ada Monroe picked at “Adam Bede” like a child picks at food on a dinner plate, I picked through “Cold Mountain” over a period of about six months. I was still in school when I started it, so there was much reading to be done on various subjects, from Archeology to Vietnam war history. I also read The Lord of the Rings trilogy during a break from reading “Cold Mountain.” I also read “Diary” by Chuck Palahniuk. But, tonight I finally finished Charles Frazier’s take on the Odyssey.

It wasn’t that the book bored me. It didn’t. Perhaps it had something to do with having seen the film adaptation already, but I don’t think it was that, either. I think the book was just slow, and demanded a slow read. The events in the book unfold as events in life often do, without identifiable pattern and without concern for the subject of the event. I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and found it to be an especially enjoyable period piece. Frazier uses even the language of the seceded South (or at least, what we accept to be the language of said period and place) to evoke a landscape and culture entirely believable and yet gritty with drama.

I don’t have much else to say about it, other than that I’d like to include a few passages which I found particularly poignant:

She (Ada) marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

This sadly struck a chord with me because I do take what I read to heart, and often try to apply morals and wisdom contained in books to my own life. Will fantastic worlds no longer hold their appeal as more and more of the life I fantasized about slips behind me? Eh, maybe. See, I even took this passage to heart.

He (Inman) talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse.

Not that I nor Frazier was there, but I can imagine that the average Southerner might have felt along these lines after a couple of years of warring for the rich man’s right to own slaves. I know that’s not what it was entirely about, and most Southerner’s held no love for the Federals, but I must assume that many questioned what they were fighting for on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.

They (Ada and Inman) were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.

Now there’s a passage I can relate to. I had never really thought of it that way before, but youth is practically over for me. I mean, sure, I’ll still experience bouts of youthfulness on and off over the next 5-to-10 years, but never again will I have the boundless confidence of youth I once possessed. Not that loss of youth is the end of the world, but it’s definitely a cusp.

What am I saying, I’m 22. Not exactly an old man. But a lot has changed in the last 22 years…