PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY

A former Marine officer recounts his disillusionment with the American military-industrial complex.

When he arrived for officer training before being sent to Afghanistan, Rubin was given a long list of bullet points assembled by officers who had been in the field, with recommendations such as buying a new canteen in the place of the nasty government-issued one and carrying tweezers to rid oneself of ticks. “The best bit, though,” he writes, “was the simple warning that it was all going to be very fucked, it was designed that way, and the most you could do was mitigate the worst of it through nonstop anticipation.” That was exactly so, he found. Having been through enlisted basic training and experienced its grinding dehumanization by which young men and women “became clumsy beasts, scared beasts, and self-conscious beasts, unsure of how beastly to be and when,” the former college Republican found himself wondering about the uselessness of a war in which everything was transactional. For ordinary Afghans in the countryside, it was normal to greet GIs one day and Taliban fighters the next, hoping neither would destroy their homes; for Marines, it was enough to stay alive when “everyone was getting fucked by the green weenie in the suck.” Rubin gets a little textbook-ish when, returning stateside to wrestle with depression and PTSD, he mounts a critique of “the carceral state and the warfare state and the capitalist state,” but there’s a sharp point to his anger over lives and treasure wasted in the name of profit for a few as well as regret for having serviced a machine centered on murder. Though lacking the street-smart fury of Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July or the literary merits of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, Rubin’s book is a rueful, heartfelt admonition.

A fierce denunciation of a pointless war “punctuated by little deaths and big deaths and then just death.”