Rant in D Minor: War Stories

Elsewhere in this issue you’ll read Nick Kent describe how rock journalism in the 1970s was akin to being embedded with a military unit. Flip the analogy around and consider that the last ten years of war reportage have been akin to rock journalism dispatched from the bunker.

Mark Boal reported on the Iraq conflict for Playboy and later penned two screenplays based on his experiences. His 2004 article ‘Death and Dishonor’, the story of Richard T. Davis, an Iraq War veteran who was murdered upon his return home in 2003, was adapted for Paul Haggis’s film In the Valley of Elah. (The original piece is still viewable on Playboy.com.) More recently there’s his screenplay for Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, adapted from a feature entitled ‘The Man In The Bomb Suit’ into a taut film that applies 70s ticking clock thriller techniques to the EOD units operating in Baghdad. Mind you, despite a comprehensive Oscar sweep last Sunday night, the film has had its critics, including Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who criticised its factual inaccuracies, and Master Sergeant Jeffrey S. Sarver, who sued the filmmakers last week, claiming that he coined the title phrase and that Boal based “virtually all of the situations” in the film on events involving him.
Former Hustler entertainment editor and porn movie reviewer Evan Wright’s 2004 book Generation Kill, adapted for the HBO mini-series by The Wire’s co-creator, David Simon, recounted his experiences embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Corps during the early stages of the invasion of Iraq. Originally serialised in Rolling Stone as ‘The Killer Elite’, which won the National Magazine Award for Reporting, the book profiled a generation of 20-something soldiers raised on porn and rap, for whom combat was akin to video game shoot ‘em ups, and who decried patriotic country songs as ‘the Special Olympics of music’.
Then there’s Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, a Scout Sniper with the STA Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon of 2nd Battalion 7th Marines, who went on to earn a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. A Gulf War memoir that took the first reel of Full Metal Jacket as its template, Jarhead rejoiced in a juicily foul-mouthed narrative voice and functioned as a study of the the testosterone-heavy psychological and emotion pressure cooker atmosphere endured by troops who trained hard but never saw fire on account of the brevity of hostilities.
Closer to home is Kildare author James Durney’s Vietnam: the Irish Experience, published in 2008 by Gaul House, a chronicle of the fates of Irish diaspora who served in the first rock ‘n’ roll war, and whose bone dry just-the-facts approach makes it it both a contrast and companion piece to classics like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, books that forever changed the way in which war stories are told.