Another Man’s Truth

At 23 years old, John Crawford was newly married and just a few credits shy of graduating from Florida State. This happy situation came to an abrupt end during his honeymoon cruise, when he learned that his National Guard unit was being called to active duty in Iraq. “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell” (Riverhead, 219 pages, $23.95) is Mr. Crawford’s account of what he experienced there.In his preface, he writes that these nonfiction stories are about “a group of college students who wanted nothing to do with someone else’s war”; for the most part, however, Mr. Crawford conveys his own point of view. This is a good choice, as his voice is engaging. The author comes across as proud but never self-aggrandizing, and often more scared and tired than he’ll admit.Mr. Crawford has a keen eye – and ear and nose – for the details of life in the infantry. In “Empty Breath,” a soldier reads “The Hobbit” to his bored friend over the radio; in “Sharks in the Tigris,” drunken Iraqis call out to Mr. Crawford’s observation post (“Kill me, America! I hate you! Shoot me!”). The dialogue seems right on the money: He’s left in all of the profanity but cut down on the jargon. Often he seems almost overwhelmed by the stench of corpses, excrement, garbage, and even his own filthy uniform.Despite an obvious respect for his comrades, Mr. Crawford is not above depicting their foibles. These men complain and squabble; they evince a casual indifference toward Iraqis. Although they don’t drink much – “hangovers are not the best way to spend a busy day in 130-degree heat” – many take drugs. (The author himself admits to being a “Valium and Prozac type of guy.”) The officers only seem to emerge when it’s clear their own safety is not at risk; looting, while infrequent, is not unheard of.Some readers may be turned off by all this honesty. We like to imagine that our servicemen are exemplary, beyond reproach. (I don’t include our servicewomen here only because the American infantry excludes them.) But I found “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell” to be an eye-opening account of their attitudes and experiences. Their sacrifice and sense of duty is not diminished just because they are human. And who wants a choirboy on your side in a fight?Mr. Crawford wishes to echo the oral tradition of Army storytelling, in order to “simply make people aware, if only for one glimmering moment, of what war is really like.” At this he succeeds. Yet the specificity of his stories is seldom used to get at larger truths. Indeed, he raises more questions than he answers.The only moral dilemma that he explores with any depth is presented in “Ghosts Inside,” in which a greedy sergeant orders Mr. Crawford along on a looting party. The author reports the sergeant to an officer, but he feels guilty about it: “I had done the right thing for the wrong reasons … I had wanted [the sergeant] gone and gotten my wish.” This is an interesting portrayal of honor among soldiers, but it’s left unresolved.In the preface, Mr. Crawford mentions that he listened “eagerly” to stories about his father’s war; in Iraq, he passes on this fascination by putting aside enemy bayonets for his nephews. Yet by the end of the book, he describes himself as stricken by a “lingering, wasting sickness that only occurs when you have nothing left.” Perhaps this mixture of tradition and devastation is something that a civilian can never understand. But considering Mr. Crawford’s literary gifts, I was hoping he would at least try to explain it.The most puzzling piece is the last, also titled “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell.” Mr. Crawford and his wife drive to his Florida hometown, where, over beers, he tells his buddies about the time an Iraqi boy pointed an AK-47 at him. Mr. Crawford shot the boy, but the gun turned out to be useless, a toy. But then the author is awakened by an explosion: Apparently the drive, his friends, the Iraqi child, were all part of a dream. Mr. Crawford then tells us that the preceding parts of this last tale were invented, taken from a “fiction short story” he wrote while still in Iraq.These cheap narrative tricks are beneath Mr. Crawford. Not only that, they suggest that he is shying away from any real synthesis. I admire his candor, and respect his service. But because he provides only the most cursory examination of his own motivations, his stories, however engaging, rarely rise above the anecdotal.Mr. Haber last wrote in these pages on the epidemic of polio.

Another Man’s Truth

Another Man’s Truth

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