First oral history of the Iraq war lets voices of duty and pain emerge

REVIEW

First oral history of the Iraq war lets voices of duty and pain emerge

Austin Considine



Wednesday, November 22, 2006


"What Was Asked of Us
An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It"

By Trish Wood
LITTLE, BROWN; 309 PAGES; $25.99

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Near the opening of the film "All Quiet on the Western Front," the camera shows us a noisy military parade in the streets of a small German town, before backing up through the window of a classroom, where a lecture is being delivered by an impassioned professor. His voice, at first, is drowned out by the blare of the marching band and the cheers from the crowd.
It is a clever critique of war's allure and its ability to mute the ostensibly peaceful pursuits of the intellect. But soon the din subsides and the professor's voice emerges, employing the language of educated antiquity -- not in support of the quiet pursuit of knowledge, but for the casus belli:
"I believe it will be a quick war, that there will be few losses," he exhorts: "But if losses there must be, let us remember the phrase ... 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori': 'Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.' "
The lust for war, the film asserts, does not exist in opposition to education -- it is a part of our education, outside and in the classroom (the Latin, after all, is from Horace).
It's little surprise, then, that we still don't know any better, finding ourselves today in Iraq -- once again at a point of seeming intractability, once again in a veritable no man's land where irony and tragedy collide.
We lack the benefit of hindsight to give proper shape to this new and abiding tragedy. What we do have, now, is perhaps something better: a series of decidedly non-pompous narratives in "What Was Asked of Us," the first oral history of the Iraq war, as told by 29 of its American veterans.
Amid the glut of policy debates, and amid the flurry of news reports that add names each day to the lists of the dead, Trish Wood, an award-winning Canadian journalist, has produced what is perhaps, to date, the only text about Iraq that matters.
"What Was Asked of Us" gives voice to the survivor, to the individual, to the proud hero and the repentant killer among the teeming hordes of the war's dead and disenfranchised. As a vehicle for awareness, and as a human voice pitched against the deafening grind of war's machinery, its accomplishment is nothing short of monumental.
The candid accounts by these soldiers are myriad and complex -- each gritty, colloquial and unfiltered -- as horrifying as they are humbling. Wood shows herself an expert interviewer, and her work is deftly edited, letting each soldier guide the reader through the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah and Najaf via his or her unique voice.
One reads as Iraqi goodwill crumbles along with promises of adequate water, sewers and electricity, and as the insurgency gains momentum. Attempts at reconciling reality with sense fall short when the narrators realize there is no sense to be made. "It's hard to put into words," one soldier says. "That's the thing about going there and doing it and coming back is that there's no way to put into words what actually happened. That's why war stories are stories, because there's no way for them to be true.
"But of course it was."
Death, and its arbitrariness, are confronted daily. When a soldier discovers a group of Marines blown apart by a roadside bomb, he muses, "It's just a matter of luck that you are not that guy. No one wants to be that guy, so you beat around in your head how lucky you are."
The soldiers' backgrounds vary: One is a born-again Christian who is appalled by the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, asking, "America, what always makes us right?" Another is an ex-drug addict who calls the war "a meaningless conflict," yet admits, "I loved every firefight I was in because for those few brief seconds nothing else matters."
Given the horrors the book recounts, its ascendant message is one of courage amid war's incomprehensible absurdities. Despite disparate reasons for joining the war effort, and divided feelings about its purpose, what unifies most of the book's contributors is duty to one another. And though regrets and circumspection abound, self-pity is nonexistent. "It doesn't matter if there's a reason or not ... it has to be done," one soldier puts it. "There is no moral to this story or anything. There rarely ever is."
Perhaps that is what makes the book so moving: Such unwavering sense of duty, right or wrong, is humbling and inspiring. Like the young, myopic students in "All Quiet," we, too, discern something in these soldiers' stories, in their spirit of self-sacrifice, that we aspire to achieve ourselves. Only later do the soldiers, like those students, learn what is truly asked of them -- nothing short of the forfeiture of their peace of mind.
"I am changed," one of the soldiers says, succinctly and poetically. From the home front, we can only imagine.

Austin Considine is a writer in New York.
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URL: SF Gate.com