Buzzell - My war: killing time in Iraq

Table of Contents

In gutsy, sometimes profane prose, he takes you on a soldiers-eye view of the front lines of the war.

Captivating memoir about the year [Buzzell] spent serving as an army trigger puller in Iraq... Though the combat scenes are exciting, this book is actually more engrossing as a portrait of the day-to-day life of a young American soldier.

My War is the story of a young grunt trying to survive.... What you soon realize about this stranger at the bar, Colby Buzzell, is that he can knock you off your barstool at a moments notice with soul-jarring observations and darkly comedic insights into what it really means to be fighting and idling in this war.

Provid[es] more truth than CNN or the army could or would.

Incredible accounts of combat from a grunts-eye view.

Funny, often surreal What the @!%# am I doing here? account of military life.

Breathtaking... Buzzells self-awareness is total and unromantic, his instinct for what matters unrelenting, his writing lyrical, heartbreaking, hilarious, and essential.

Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers

Raw, sardonic, and thrashingly honest, My War is a stellar grunts-eye view of the Iraq war.

Kids from the suburbs dont really join the military. At least not where Im from. After high school you do one of two things, you either get your education on at some big-name university or college, or you live at your parents and smoke pot and work a shit job, like telemarketing. Maybe even pretend to go to college by taking one or two remedial classes at the JC, just to get Mom and Pops off your back while you figure out exactly what you want to do with yourself.

The only guys I knew who joined the armed forces were guys who came from families who had fathers who served in the military at some point in their lives. When you grow up with a parent who was in the military, you dont really look down on the military, you just look at it as an acceptable path to take, an option. The only guys I knew from high school who joined the military didnt join up right after the graduation ceremony, either, they joined several years after, once they dropped out of school and/or realized living at their parents house kinda sucked.

Theres this bar over by my parents house in the Bay Area that I fucking hate going to, just because its like a bad high school reunion every time I walk into it. You cant even enjoy a drink without bumping into somebody you went to high school with, either somebody you knew or somebody you barely knew. Theyd all act super excited to see you. Oh my God! theyd say. Is that you? Oh my God it is! Do you remember me? We had third-period U.S. history together. How are you?! What have you been up to?!

Id always say one of two things, Oh, same old shit, or if I had a couple drinks in me already, Id tell them some phony-baloney story that I was working part-time programming digital orbital satellite missions for NASA down in San Jose. Either way, whether I told them I was working for NASA or that I wasnt doing jack shit with my life, it didnt really matter, they would all say the same thing in returnWow, thats really cool. And then, without me even asking for it, they would give me a sit rep (situation report) on what theyd done since high school. Theyd start talking about how college was so great (Im sure it was), how they, like, love their job (yeah right), or theyd talk about all the horizon-expanding places that theyd traveled to (a trip to New York does not count as traveling), and how theyre only living at home right now temporarily, for whatever reason (maybe because once they graduated from college they realized that they couldnt find a job with that diploma that they spent the last four years of their life on and they have no idea what to do now).

All my friends and almost everybody that I knew were barely making it and were always one or two paychecks away from moving back home. The only guys I knew from high school (keep in mind I didnt really hang out with Model UN or Academic Decathlon kids) who were actually making some kind of a decent living were guys who went off and got action-hero jobscops, firemen, soldiers.

Right before I moved to San Francisco I was in that bar that I hate, over by my parents house, and I bumped into an old friend of mine from high school whom I hadnt seen in years. We knew each other from playing football together. Both of our fathers fought in the jungles of Nam, his in the Marines, mine in the Army. For as long as I can remember, my father never once advised me or encouraged me to join the military. He also never tried to talk me out of it whenever I flirted with the idea. He always suggested and strongly encouraged that I go to college instead, or art school, or some kind of tech school. Which I never did, except for a couple wank community-college classes here and there, like photography and computers 101, just so my parents would get off my back and stop fucking asking me, So when are you going back to school?

My friend went off and joined the Marine Corps a couple years after high school, and now he was back living at his parents temporarily while he was working at a local recruiting station. At the bar, we got drunk together and he told me all about the Marines and the friends hed made there. It sounded pretty cool. I was twenty-five at the time, and I asked him if that was too old to join, and he said hell no. He told me about another guy I had graduated with who wasnt doing shit with his life either, who had just enlisted in the Corps.

As we got more and more drunk and the night went on and the stories about the Marines got wilder and wilder, so did my enthusiasm about signing up. He made it sound like joining the Marines was like joining a party frat with weapons that gave out paychecks, which of course sounded good to me, and maybe the globe-and-eagle Marine Corps tattoo with the words Semper Fi over it might look kinda cool on my forearm. So at the end of the night I slammed an empty Guinness glass down on the bar and told him, Fuck it, Ill do it! and we exchanged numbers (our parents digits of course).

The next morning, when I woke up and started sobering up, the idea of being a jarhead didnt seem quite so appealing. So when my friend called and told me how I got home (it was one of those nights) and asked me when I wanted to stop by the recruiting office, I told him, Sorry dude, that was the beers talking last night.

And I didnt hear from him again until I was in Mosul. He sent me this e-mail: