By Anthony Swofford

Immediately after any conflict, conflagration, or flood, journalists produce the first books that the public devours. Later, politicians and diplomats will hire ghostwriters to burnish their images with eight-hundred-page tomes, any ten pages of which might be used for insomnia. We’re now far enough into the latest war that books written by combatants have begun to appear.

In this space I’ll discuss four recent books that have come out of the current American war in Iraq. Three are by journalists, two of those are memoirs and one is reportage, and one, by a soldier, is what I’m calling a blogmoir, a combination blog and memoir.

Chris Ayres became a journalist “to meet celebrities, dine at Michelin-starred restaurants, and feel important at parties.” At first, he got his wish, and then his wish was shattered by war and his own cowardice, the cowardice that his father claims is genetic and that he claims was the reason he agreed to cover the war for the London Times: Ayres was too much of a coward to tell the editor he admired that Ayres was too much of a coward to go to war. War Reporting for Cowards is the result, and we are lucky for it. After finishing the book I thought Ayres rather brave, though he’d undoubtedly bristle upon reading that judgment. The book is an uproarious ride through Ayres’s early days in journalism (this being the celebrity and Michelin phase), a blitzkrieg shopping trip in Beverly Hills when he must fill his Jeep with the gear on the list the Pentagon provided for Marine embeds, and nine days at war with an artillery unit the marines themselves called the Long Distance Death Dealers. The public affairs officer of the unit, Captain Hotspur, tells Ayres upon meeting him, “People think artillery is boring. But we kill more people than anyone else.”

Ayres’s guides through the war are a likable bunch; Captain Rick Rogers, known to his men as Buck; Lance Corporal “Fightin’ Dan” Murphy — “Do they do much fightin’ in London?” Murphy asks Ayres; and First Sergeant Frank Hustler, a lifer with a wife at home in Southern California.

“I didn’t expect to die so quickly,” Ayres tells us a few minutes into the First Marine Division’s assault north from Kuwait. The rear passenger door on his Humvee had flung open, and his torso flew out the door as well, his legs held in place by his rucksack and other gear. No one else had noticed his misfortune, and while Ayres enjoyed a close and personal view of the spinning monster truck tires of the Humvee, Buck cursed his failing GPS, “Fightin’ Dan” Murphy, the driver, tried to maneuver the vehicle out of a ditch, and Hustler, on duty at the roof-mounted machine gun, looked for bad guys. The situation would not improve for Ayres.

Ayres spends some time considering the embed process, and its end result. When the unit, lost and detached from the rest of the battalion, meets a thirsty, begging Bedouin who might also be an insurgent drawing them into an ambush, Ayres thinks, “Just shoot him.” He recognizes this is the incorrect impulse for a war reporter. “What I should have been thinking was “Interview him; get out and interview him.” But I was more interested in staying alive than staying objective. The trouble was, I felt like a Marine. I was about as neutral as Murphy’s trigger finger.”

Ayres is reduced to calling his girlfriend in L.A. by satellite phone and asking her to scan the Times’s Web site to learn if the editors have used his stories. During a storm the Long Distance Death Dealers, in a particularly effective counteroffensive, fought off a tank ambush. The story was good and Ayres knew it. Time to call L.A.: “It is the front page,” the girlfriend tells him. And Ayres tells us, “For a brief, exhilarating moment, I realized why people become war reporters. The thrill of writing an I-nearly-died-a-gruesome-death story is unbeatable.”

Shortly after this, nine days into the war, because of a technical glitch with a certain brand of satellite phone, and an escape route that one of his bosses at the Times offers, Ayres bids the Death Dealers farewell and hitches a ride back to Kuwait, not an altogether safe option, what with convoys being attacked by Fedayeen, but one that has a Sheraton and an order of “the Wagyu-Kobe beef, the dozen gulf prawns with lobster tail, and three cappuccinos” at the end of it. Ayres battles with some shame over leaving the unit, and we experience this battle with him; they’re decent young men fighting an indecent war, and like him, we have come to like Buck and Fightin’ Dan and Hustler.

Ayres’s book is heartbreakingly funny and often tender and always insightful about the job of journalism and the dirtier job demanded of the Long Distance Death Dealers. And he confirms for us that soldiers love jokes about nuns and the French.

In Over There: From the Bronx to Baghdad, Alan Feuer, a reporter for The New York Times, uses a different geographical and tactical approach. Feuer doesn’t embed, and he spends a lot of time in Jordan, trying to make it into Iraq and earn some inches in the paper of record. In Over There he makes the poor narrative decision of using a third person, Timesian distance technique, calling himself This Reporter, or T.R. T.R. once “confesses to a lie,” and in the early pages of the book while describing his editor, Jonathan Landman, seems to insist that the “cold arithmetic of fact” is less important than the “difficult and human truth” of a story. Some readers might have difficulty with the idea that Feuer’s arithmetic is possibly off, but the human truths he gathers here are essential to understanding both war and its reporters.

Feuer drinks impressive amounts of alcohol in this book, and a reader might be forgiven for believing that reporters enjoy whisky, profanity, and jokes about nuns and the French just as much as any soldier. In Jordan livers are mangled at the cantina Mama Juanita’s, inside the Intercontinental, among other hotel bars. At press joints around the world reporters will for decades talk about epic bouts of drinking undertaken at the Intercontinental during that bleak desert winter of 2003.

Eventually Feuer and a Times colleague and about one hundred other reporters gallop further east, to Ruweished, but they’re still in Jordan. “And yet there was no blood in Ruweished; the blood was in Iraq. Could it be that Jordan at peace was stranger than Iraq at war?” Yes is the answer. Of Ruweished, which resembled a Gold Rush town, he writes, “Entering the Arab Beach, T.R. was not surprised to find a snack bar called the Baghdad Cafe, nor was he shocked to find a laundry service in ‘The Clubhouse’ with a billiards table, television set, and public hookah pipe.” The entrepreneurial Jordanians weren’t going to allow Blackwater Security to be the only ones making profit from this great American money machine, war.

Earlier, at the Hyatt in Amman, T.R. had run into some gruff, silent armed Americans. He attempted to ply them with ale and jokes: “As gin and wickedness are social greases to the upper class, so beer and insults have a similar effect among the middle.” The men remained tight-lipped. T.R. got wasted while his Times colleague directly asked the fellows straight up who they were, and they told him. It makes for great comedy watching a reporter have his turf stolen from underneath him as a Lothario might steal his girl. Before departing the men tell T.R. that while making the trek to Baghdad, “The biggest problem is going to be your onesies, twosies, and threesies.” They were warning T.R. about individuals and small groups of fighters killing and taking hostages. The ex-military men were from Blackwater Security, a firm T.R. and most of the world had never heard of, but one that in the near future would play pivotal roles in occupation-era Iraq, just like the onesies, twosies, and threesies.

After the Americans had taken Baghdad, the battalion of fuming reporters traveled from the border to the capital city. T.R. was allowed into one of Saddam’s former palaces, with a U.S. Army escort. “It was now inconceivable to storm the palace without a rear brigade of hacks — it felt, in fact, as if the palace had been taken in order to display it to the hacks.” Later in the same paragraph Feuer states, “The military, by its nature, dominated what it touched; it was not a generous establishment.”

A majority of the reporting from Iraq during the invasion was touched by the military, and some of it still is. One benefit of a reporter’s postwar memoir is that the military doesn’t vet the text or grant access. Perhaps in the memoir rather than from the original reporting we will discover the actual war that was fought. Feuer’s contribution to the record is funny, incisive, poignant, and smart.

What to do with the military blogger who gets the most hits? Give him a book contract. That seems to be what happened with Colby Buzzell. He offers us My War: Killing Time in Iraq. It might have sounded like a good idea. The problems occur when the writer tries to move the language of his blog into a somewhat structured narrative.

We need some back story, so: the typical tale of the typical Northern California stoner kid who in his mid-twenties has lived in a few cities, kept no job for longer than three months, and intermittently lived with mom and dad; begin war; drunken night with high school friend now in military; visit Army recruiter; Army recruiter offers guidance on how to pass urinalysis test; pass test; basic training; disparaging remarks about authority; marry old girlfriend in order to make extra cash; repeat these words often: like, cool, awesome, kinda; invoke punk-rock ethos by naming bands that had broken up before writer’s tenth birthday.

But My War is less Black Flag and way more like Green Day. Not shaved heads and raw guitar anger and Jack Daniel’s, but coifed dyed hair and post-punk arena shows and Trappist ale. The book is at its most interesting when Buzzell’s blog entries are presented to us in their original form, in bold font. Then we know we’re reading a blog: casual, even street, with no structural expectations other than a beginning and as much steam as the blogger can muster until the colonel powers-down the recreation center.

When Buzzell blogs after a fierce firefight in Mosul, it is thrilling and raw reading, warfare nearly instantaneously transfigured from memory to text. The firefight blog entries are truly remarkable documents: “Bullets were pinging off our armor, and you could hear multiple RPGs being fired, soaring through the air every which way and impacting all around us. All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions were going off . . . . I was like, this is it, I’m going to die.” These scenes bring combat and valor and extreme fear and violence to life, especially when Buzzell offers the military’s dry version of the same events. And here he is most insightful and tentatively has his finger on a hugely damaging trigger, but he fails to totally unload his magazine the way he would on a street full of insurgents: the military is creating a fiction surrounding the readiness and participation of Iraqi forces. In the military’s version the Iraqi forces lead all the fighting, but in the far more believable version offered by Buzzell, the Iraqi forces are working sweep-up when they happen to be around. The dismal level of Iraqi force readiness is one of the biggest failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the continuing American military occupation of Iraq. But Buzzell doesn’t elucidate the problem using his unique perspective.

This highlights another problem with the blog and the blogmoir. The publishers and the blogger want to move his entries into a deliverable and sellable hardcopy package, but the blog was never intended for sale. Thus, the blogger is rushed into forcing blog entries into a narrative form they do not fit: the military blogger especially, who wants to get out of the military and make some real money from his writing, the easiest and flimsiest way on earth to earn money after carrying a rifle for a living. But in the rush to publish, the blogger is not allowed the years that are necessary to practice both craft and thought, so we are offered event and emotion only. Event and emotion can carry a blog, but they alone cannot carry a book. The abject realism of the blog weighs heavily on the printed pages of the blogmoir.

But the blogmoir allows the blogger and his publisher to assure the reader of his book that he has credibility from the blogosphere, because he can reprint e-mails from admiring fans. Buzzell even throws in support quotes from his company commander: “Wow, you’re a good writer, that stuff you wrote is pretty fucking good.”

Buzzell’s blog is thick with gallows humor and the dark, violent work of the mechanized infantryman. Go to this book for the blog entries alone and you won’t be disappointed. The problem with this blogmoir, and I suspect we can expect the same from others that will undoubtedly appear, is that the only salvageable material is from the original blog. I suggest a blogvella, of not more than one hundred and ten pages.

It is unfortunate that Anthony Shadid could not have seen into the future and published his tour de force Night Draws Near before the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. If such a mind-bending act were possible he might have altered our country’s path toward such an inadvisable war, or at least altered the troubling aftermath. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, has spent most of his career reporting from the Middle East. He knew the language and the culture of Iraq and had reported from Baghdad before his arrival there on March 11, 2003. He drizzles his book with a rich cultural and religious history of the country and allows the reader to enter the lives of everyday Iraqis. In his prologue he states, “The Americans brought a revolution without ambition and an upheaval without design.” And then he has Iraqis tell their stories for four hundred pages, allowing us to discover that he is right.

I found it impossible to read Shadid’s book and not keep asking myself the billion-dollar question: How might we have freed the Iraqis of the openly despotic and demonic Saddam Hussein and not forced the country into anarchy?

After the American Army has entered Baghdad, Shadid is out on the streets, not embedded but traveling with his former Iraqi minder, a man he’s always trusted and who gave him a bit of free rein during the countdown to the war. Some of the first men he speaks to are doctors relieved by the fall of Saddam and the presence of the Americans but deeply unsure about the future of their country. Shadid approaches them after they’ve unsuccessfully asked a group of soldiers not to fly an American flag from their tank. “It’s not the right time to raise flags,” one of the doctors tells Shadid. “Iraqis should free themselves, not the foreigners,” another says. “We wish we could do it ourselves,” adds another.

One of the most telling shifts over Shadid’s fifteen months in Iraq is witnessed in the lives and opinions of Karima Salman and her eight children. “Over the year, iconography had proliferated in Karima’s apartment. More posters went up of Shiite saints, consoling portraits.” A troubled son whose faith had always been doubtful set off on a pilgrimage with friends.

American planners had not foreseen the resurgence and relevance of Shiite religious and political power. The biggest surprise was the thirty-year-old cleric Muqtada Sadr. Saddam had killed his popular cleric father, Mohammed Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, and two of his brothers. Muqtada Sadr took advantage of the postinvasion power vacuum; he started grass-roots aid organizations and used the power of Friday prayer to bring followers to his militia, the Mahdi army. Shadid insists that before they were openly armed and at conflict with American forces, the “intent of the Mahdi army was becoming clear.” “To those who say we cannot expel the occupation forces from Najaf, I say we can,” Sadr told followers. Shadid calls Sadr’s “a meteoric ascent that would in time write the epitaph for the American occupation.”

Shadid’s analysis of the American Green Zone staff, their abilities and the likelihood of their success is damning: “Its staff had been chosen more for their partisan loyalty than for diplomatic skills suited to the management of an occupation of one of the Middle East’s most strategically important countries.” The Green Zone was a slice of America dropped into the middle of Baghdad, and most who worked there reconstructing the country rarely, if ever, left.

This book should be read for its keen analysis of the events in postinvasion Iraq as much as for its thoughtful and precise storytelling and portraiture of Iraqis trying to make sense of their radically changed country. Even after reading this rather bleak account of the American record, and the accompanying Iraqi failures, one is still left with the hope that some day the City of Peace will return to its old form. From Shadid’s account it’s obvious that normalcy is what most Iraqis want, and now it remains to be seen whether America will assist properly with that vision. Shadid’s book should be a guidepost for how some of that might be achieved.

The four books here are a part of the early written history of the Iraq war, occupation, and aftermath. War is an ugly and evil business, and so too is writing about it. Writing about war, just like waging it, has its costs. Early in his embed training Ayres received such a lesson from a veteran Dutch war reporter, Gottfried, who’d “witnessed some of the most depraved acts of humankind in all the world’s major terror-tour destinations . . . .” Ayres asked the war-coverage veteran what war was like, and the Dutchman told him he’d lost his wife and kids. “They died?” the incredulous Ayres asked the damaged reporter. “She left me,” the Dutchman replied. “Why wait for Gottfried?” he said, “Gottfried talks only of hell.” And we are fortunate to have the Gottfrieds among us.

Anthony Swofford is the author of Jarhead, the basis for the film that was released in early November. He lives in New York City and is completing a novel.

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