Book Recommendation
A couple of days ago I decided to pick up some "macho" reading. "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell" by John Crawford seemed to fit the bill. It is a series of stories about his (many times extended) tour of duty as a National Guardsman in Iraq.
Crawford's style was not what I had expected. It is gently descriptive, almost lyrical, making it jarring to the nerves when he details picking an Iraqi's brain fragment off his boot with the handle of a spoon from his MRE. It is brutally honest, not about carnage necessarily, but about his acquired indifference to it. I guess I was expecting something a little more muscular in style, something lacking in sensitivity and jam packed with testosterone pumped anger and resentment. In Crawford's book the muscle is in the sensitivity.
This is not to say that "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell" is a weepy, bleeding heart journal about the atrocities of war. Hardly. It is so much deeper than that. Moments of bloodshed are few (but horrible) in the book, though the anticipation of stumbling across a nightmare or two lingers on every page. The expectation of death is palpable and, occassionally, its refusal to arrive is frustrating. Crawford, as well as the other men that populate his book, reek with adolescent hijinx, boredom, loneliness, resentment and despair. Through his careful reconstruction of time and place it became clear how a young and intelligent man could become someone so indifferent to others. It became easy to understand how a person could come to shake a legless and hungry man off of his boot and walk away.
I don't want to ruin anything for anyone who picks up this book, but I must mention the last story from which the book gets its title. There is an obvious literary trick in this story. Something I would normally accept and move on if it were not for a simple final paragraph that, in its context made my heart fall to my knees. The entire book is worth providing the context for that last few sentances.
It's worth a read.
Crawford's style was not what I had expected. It is gently descriptive, almost lyrical, making it jarring to the nerves when he details picking an Iraqi's brain fragment off his boot with the handle of a spoon from his MRE. It is brutally honest, not about carnage necessarily, but about his acquired indifference to it. I guess I was expecting something a little more muscular in style, something lacking in sensitivity and jam packed with testosterone pumped anger and resentment. In Crawford's book the muscle is in the sensitivity.
This is not to say that "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell" is a weepy, bleeding heart journal about the atrocities of war. Hardly. It is so much deeper than that. Moments of bloodshed are few (but horrible) in the book, though the anticipation of stumbling across a nightmare or two lingers on every page. The expectation of death is palpable and, occassionally, its refusal to arrive is frustrating. Crawford, as well as the other men that populate his book, reek with adolescent hijinx, boredom, loneliness, resentment and despair. Through his careful reconstruction of time and place it became clear how a young and intelligent man could become someone so indifferent to others. It became easy to understand how a person could come to shake a legless and hungry man off of his boot and walk away.
I don't want to ruin anything for anyone who picks up this book, but I must mention the last story from which the book gets its title. There is an obvious literary trick in this story. Something I would normally accept and move on if it were not for a simple final paragraph that, in its context made my heart fall to my knees. The entire book is worth providing the context for that last few sentances.
It's worth a read.
posted by Bree O'Connor at 2:04 AM
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