Entertainment, Books - Marine Corps Times

To tell the truth

Arguably, the best of the soldier memoirs that have been arriving almost monthly from the Middle East is “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq.”

John Crawford, a 28-year-old former National Guard specialist who served in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, captures it all in fewer than 220 pages: the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the assault and pacification of Nasiriyah, the surrounding and entering of Baghdad and the dangerous occupation that followed.

“While the journalists who followed us carried pens and kept extensive notebooks and journals, I carried a machine gun,” he writes. Along with his weapon, he brought a vivid and perceptive eye for everything he and his buddies saw and experienced.

The urge to jot down the brutal realities of combat consumed him. And at the suggestion of a reporter assigned to his unit, he began writing more seriously, dispatching his notes-turned-short stories via an anonymous e-mail account. The compelling, swiftly penned passages were turned into this book.

Mind you, this is no mere collection of bloody snippets. The chapter selections on the daily life of the ordinary soldier in Iraq are brief, yet cogent and complete in themselves, making for a satisfying read.

Often combining humor with anger, sadness and frequent disillusionment, Crawford writes, “If I managed to capture anything with my book, it’s the way soldiers actually are -- how we talked, how we dealt with different situations, the way we joked about things, the drug usage and sometimes the way we were just f------ off in general.”

Intrinsic to all this is the subtle transformation taking place in the young warrior -- the change from an innocent into an irresolute but bitter fighter. For example, when other soldiers from the invasion force were rotated home, Crawford’s unit was left behind.

“We felt betrayed,” he writes. “We felt we’d done all this fighting and no one was giving us any credit for it.

“At one point we were literally forgotten. We didn’t know who to blame: the president, the Pentagon, or our battalion commander.”

Crawford has the guts to describe the extent of steroid and Valium abuse by some of our troops; his reactions to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal when the story first broke and the rejection of Army Pfc. Lynndie England’s plea agreement; and the looting by some of his buddies, who found cash in a house that was supposedly being used by Fedayeen terrorists.

Crawford writes in an easy narrative so we see and feel what he and his fellow soldiers went through. An astute observer of combat conditions, he is not afraid to say that, although at one point he worried U.S. troops would be in Iraq forever, he now thinks the U.S. must finish what it started.

‘The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq.’ By John Crawford. Riverhead Books. 240 pages. $24.

Don DeNevi is a freelance writer in California.