Entertainment, Books - Marine Corps Times

Savvy and sincere: Two war-zone accounts that stand out

The welcome mat for memoirs by veterans of operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom might never wear out so long as they write with the savvy of Brandon Friedman and the sincerity of Heidi Squier Kraft. One wins respect with literary style, the other with genuine empathy.

After reading the title and subtitles of Friedman’s book — “The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War. A Screaming Eagle in Afghanistan and Iraq” — you’d think there would be nothing left for him to say. Not so. Other writers have described similar experiences. Friedman’s take is vivid, frank, precise and dramatic.

Currently a contributor to the Daily Kos blog, Friedman served as an officer in Afghanistan and Iraq — but his being served ouzo in Greece is the book’s dramatic zenith, a tense account in which he successfully evokes feelings of being entrapped, of being duped, of being near harm. These feelings illustrate the effect of war and politics on one veteran fresh off the lines.

When a gentleman strikes up a sidewalk conversation that leads to a dark bar hosted by two ladies of the night, Friedman immediately realizes the players could be the characters in a setup. You can hear a Screaming Eagle scream silently, and a warrior’s instincts kick in.

This is not to say war takes a back seat to a bar stool. On the contrary, Athens is just one stop on the path from being “hawkish war junkie” in college to an infantry platoon leader in war, where he discovers, when he fumbles his platoon through its first combat in Afghanistan, that “this type of work is not as easy as it looks on TV.”

“Spend enough time in a war and you’ll become familiar with [fear]. You’ll feel it eat slowly at your mind like battery acid, corroding it more and more each day.”

Like the days on a calendar, Friedman’s narrative personifies a nation’s route from Manhattan to Bagram to Hillah — with a second lieutenant tour guide who voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and who “learned to shoot ... learned to fight ... and learned to enjoy it.”

On active duty, he remains a “professional soldier” and proud of his service. But he goes through his version of horror.

“I did know that I should have been dead at least twice,” he realizes in northern Iraq, “and yet here I was, still hanging on. These things happen, I guess. You just accept them, move on, and don’t tell your mother.”

After time in two battle zones, disenchantment displaces desire. Friedman “wanted to believe in my work,” but “instead, I was watching as politicians with no military experience hijacked the Army.”

“Calling in the strikes became like ordering pizza. You place an order over the radio for what you want. ... It’s times like that, I figure, and times like the fast-approaching morning in Hillah that you become emotionally dead. It is adrenaline. Overdose. Addiction. Your personal weapon becomes the needle, and every time you charge the handle to lock and load before a mission, you inject the adrenaline, which over time will become like heroin to you. You let yourself drift into an emotional coma. If you didn’t, you would go mad.”

Navy clinical psychologist Heidi Squier Kraft, a lieutenant commander, left her 15-month-old twins with her Marine husband and family and deployed to Iraq with a Marine surgical company.

All at once she was an officer, a counselor, a mother and a wife, and her book alternates shop talk in Iraq with baby talk in e-mails from back home. At first the voices make war psychology seem like Shrink Lite and make well-meaning family missives seem trite. However, as Kraft opens the minds of doctors and patients, the occasional e-mail becomes a relief — and a reminder that many people balance parallel realities.

Her reality in Iraq, where “scorching days dragged on, making bad copies of one another,” makes “Rule Number Two” succeed. (“Rule number one,” says the TV show “MASH,” “is that young men die. Rule number two is that doctors can’t change” the rules.) Kraft’s episodes describe moments of personal and professional honesty. What does a combat psychologist do, anyway?

• Runs up stairs to find a suicidal lance corporal locked in a restroom stall, a note on the floor saying “I am sorry.” Orders the Marine to “open this door right now.” Then offers two of the most soothing words in the English language: “It’s OK.”

• Confronts an obstinate Marine who demonstrates he has no desire to talk about his stress. “In one fluid motion, my patient swung his M16 around on his lap so that it pointed almost, but not quite, directly at me. In an instant, I noticed that the magazine was inserted and his finger was resting above the trigger.”

• Asks a severely wounded, suffering corporal who cannot communicate otherwise to “squeeze my hand” if he can hear her voice in the hospital room. He squeezes. That little movement by Jason Dunham — posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor — brings a brief, visible hope to Kraft and her colleagues and, to readers, an awareness of a combat psychologist’s value on the warfront.

“I had met [a lance corporal] early in the day as he recovered from surgery on our ward. I remembered the tattoos on his arms. One said USMC. And one, he told me, used to say Semper Fi. After that day’s car bomb had taken out most of his forearm, only the S and the E remained. I remembered his tears and the way he swiped mercilessly at them. He felt fear. He felt shame that far outweighed the fear. He went on to explain that he had been in Iraq almost two months. This injury would earn him his third Purple Heart. He told me he was afraid his luck was about to run out. He was ashamed to feel afraid.”

The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War. A Screaming Eagle in Afghanistan and Iraq, by Brandon Friedman (Zenith Press, $24.95).

Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital, by Dr. Heidi Squier Kraft (Little Brown, $23.99).