AS YOU WERE

A harrowing account of life with Grandpa Bullshit, the Fugawi Indians, and some of the baddest actors in the Forever War.

“As you were” is militarese for “disregard the immediately previous order,” but it makes a nicely suggestive title for a book that alternates between grim reality and ribald humor. The hard hits come fast. In the early pages, we learn that Tromblay’s grandfather was a mob enforcer in Chicago; the author’s twin was stillborn; “Mom drank and smoked a bit while pregnant”; and Dad was constantly womanizing, “if only to spread his seed and prove he’s man enough to make a son.” Dad doesn’t appear much in these pages, while Grandpa Gene was found “dead on the shitter about six years before you came to be.” Shinnob, Innu Montagnais, Sámi, and “a little Irish too,” Tromblay found shelter from a brutal youth in the Army. In a section that neatly bookends Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, he recounts the grim travails of boot camp, with its screaming drill sergeants and vomit-inducing Georgia heat: “You’ve never known love until you’ve shared a toilet bowl with another person and effectively held onto one another to stop from faceplanting into the water while violently retching.” Later, he served as a prison guard in Iraq, where he herded insurgents from one interrogation to the next, sending some to Guantánamo packed into a cargo plane and chained to the floor. “It’s an indelible sight, one which reminds you of the diagrams of the slave ships in your high school history books,” Tromblay writes memorably. Back stateside, under the guidance of a Vietnam veteran who made the author “realize surviving the peace is up to you,” he began to write even as tragedies personal and universal continued to mount.

An incandescent addition to both Native American letters and the literature of the Iraq and Afghan wars.