A hard-on for action

Military thriller novels by those in the know give a very different view of what it means to be a proud US soldier serving in the Gulf.

by Chris LaVigne

"The equation was simple. Eight lives to one. If the only thing that could save his marines' lives was this boy's death, he had no choice."

So goes the interior monologue of Gunnery Sergeant Sid Gault in Dave Poyer's novel Black Storm as he decides how to react to a ten-year-old boy having discovered his unit behind enemy lines. His thoughts are clearly a soldier's: cold, clinical, and pragmatic. He faces a mathematical problem, not a human one.

With rescued POW Jessica Lynch smiling out from every tabloid cover, the mainstream media has been giving the US military the kind of positive press usually reserved for a Jennifer Lopez wedding. Knowing not all soldiers are doe-eyed teenage girls, however, I turned to the military thriller novel--those pulp fiction warehouses of gritty realism, one-sentence paragraphs, and eight-letter acronyms--to get a different glimpse of the war.

Choosing books that revolved around US military operations in Iraq, I found myself immersed in a world nothing like the one televised on CNN and Fox News. Boasting strong military readership--the covers of the books sport blurbs from retired officers and publications like the Air Force Times--and usually written by authors with military experience, novels like Black Storm or Chris Stewart's The Kill Box give the reader an insider's look into what it means to be an American soldier. I found it to be a truly frightening view.

The novels reveal a much darker side to the US soldier than we get from TV, where most reporters cloak their American heroes in patriotic disguises of honour and virtue. Quite differently, characters in the books are almost uniformly racist. The American soldiers repeatedly refer to their foes as "ragheads," "dogfaces," "bastards," "scumbags," and "stinking Iraqis." Killing them is as morally taxing as squashing a bug.

Perhaps more disturbing is the exuberance with which the American characters look forward to bloodshed. "Let's go people--we have some Iraqis to bomb," an Air Force sergeant enthusiastically exclaims in James Ferro's Going Deep, the first installment in his HOGS series of Gulf War novels. In Tom Willard's Desert Star, from his Strike Fighters series, a pilot nicknamed "Rhino" expresses disappointment that his mission involves diplomacy rather than violence. "Hell . . . I'd rather shoot the bastards down," he laments.

Rhino is similarly eloquent when he expresses the frustration of US soldiers awaiting combat during Operation Desert Shield. "Christ! I'm getting a hard-on for some action," he complains. Going one better, Corporal Denny Blaisell from Poyer's Black Storm actually does get an erection in anticipation of starting his mission in Iraq. These are definitely not the same images of the reluctant defenders of democracy that CNN shows posing with Iraqi children and spreading American flags over any available inanimate object.

Corporal Denny Blaisell from Poyer's Black Storm actually gets an erection in anticipation of starting his mission in Iraq.

And for sure, a sexually aroused US soldier salivating over the prospect of converting "ragheads" into corpses is not People magazine cover material.

While the novels pardon any American violence with a wink-wink, "boys will be boys" attitude, Iraqi violence is always presented as evidence of an ingrained and probably genetic brutality that characterizes the whole nation, if not the entire Arab world. References to Iraqis invariably depict them as abhorrent monsters who rape and torture indiscriminately and with great enjoyment.

"The Iraqis kill for the pleasure of killing," one of Willard's characters declares, apparently not having read the rest of the book in which his American comrades gleefully slaughter as many Iraqis as possible. That American soldiers may be different from their Iraqi counterparts only in degree and not in kind is a conclusion Willard and the other writers are unwilling to admit. The inability to engage with these kinds of complexities and the attempt to simplify real historical events into James Bond scenarios is what makes the high-selling military thriller genre so ridiculous, and yet so dangerous.

Like a David Frum speech, the military thriller defines good and evil in such simplistic ways as to be totally useless. Anything an American does is good or done with the best of intentions and anything an Iraqi does is bad and done purposefully out of malice, regardless of whether they actually perform the same action. Any shades of gray are rejected for a black-or-white, with-us-or-against-us perspective.

Of course, such a portrait of the world does not stand up to close, or even distant, scrutiny. Willard, for example, dedicates his book to "the brave people of Kuwait" while demonstrating over the course of 265 pages no awareness of the intricacies of the Iraq-Kuwait conflict that prompted the Gulf War or any understanding of Kuwaiti culture. He presents all Kuwaitis as innocents and laughably depicts the emir of Kuwait--rescued in the novel by Willard's unfortunately-named protagonist Boulton Sacrette--as a heroic figure.

In fact, Kuwait's emir is a harsh dictator who, with Western support, routinely dissolves his country's national assembly, has banned all political parties, and is continually chastised by Amnesty International for human rights violations. Far from innocent, many Kuwaitis have been agitating for a reformed criminal code that would allow lawbreakers to be sentenced to flogging, stoning, and amputation and that would make abortion and conversion from Islam punishable by death.

We live in a complicated world. While his regime has been unspeakably cruel, Saddam Hussein's legacy also includes the introduction of progressive social programs to the people of Iraq. Iraqi Kurds, another supposedly innocent group, have undoubtedly endured great violence at Hussein's hands, but have also proved quite capable of killing each other as their warring leaders play realpolitik chicken with Iraq and the West. The US military might now be responsible for liberating Iraqis, but has carelessly killed hundreds of thousands of them in the past.

Instead of these ambiguities, our politicians and media give us pulp fiction scenarios of rescued POWs, mythical weapons caches, toppled statues, and village massacres. They try to turn our complex and multifaceted planet into the facile contents of a military thriller. Perhaps books like The Kill Box and Going Deep have a place in bookstores, but they have little to do with the real world. The simple equations of a soldier are impotent when faced with the convoluted ways in which human beings actually behave.