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Why You Need to Read _Fire and Forget_


Let me be more specific: by “you,” I mean us. US civilians. Fire and Forget’s “short stories from the long war” are each written by an American with intimate experience of our most recent military campaigns, and you need to read them. And, yes, “campaign” is the right word.

1) Because you don’t speak their language yet, but you’re going to. The vets are coming home again; Jon and Jane have to find each other somehow. From its opening story—Jacob Siegel’s “Smile, There are IEDs Everywhere”—the single most pervasive theme in this book is the tin ear we civilians have, even those who haven’t cultivated deafness to keep safe, comfortable, and oblivious. Stateside, the number of instructors currently competent to to teach us this language born of occupation is still very few, yet it seems clear that the first, best lessons will come through literature. These authors are our teachers. How else than in literature have we ever learned what it’s like for others?

2) Because the one story not told by a vet is from Siobhan Fallon, an army spouse and author of You Know When the Men are Gone. When her character Evie cusses out her husband, you get it, and, for once, he does too. The citations she provides from a book of psychobabble (Battle Spouses’ Tips for a Smooth Transition) are real enough that you want her to write the rest of the book. But then you realize she has. What her story also makes clear—no less than the rest of the collection—is that there is no unboot camp. We’ve gotten very good at creating killers, and in teaching “rules of engagement.” How much gets spent on teaching disengagement?

3) Because “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it “Operation Scooby” [. . . .] First time was instinct. I hear O’Leary go, “Jesus,” and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still [. . .] that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs” (Phil Klay, “Redeployment” 39).

4) Because variety is spice. What’s your pleasure? a) formal experimentation? b) lyrical imagery? c) realism, equal parts magic and grit? d) psychosurgery without anesthesia? It’s in there. Check out Gavin Ford Kovite, Brian Turner, Perry O’Brien, and Matt Gallagher, respectively and respectfully. Any collection or anthology has two bars to clear, quality and scope, and, as obstacle courses go, it ain’t easy. Each of the stories just mentioned will get definitely taught, for reasons that differ as much as readers do.

5) Because what gets left out is at least as important. If you’re been paying attention at all, then you’ll know that our vets today are killing themselves in record numbers. And yet there’s no suicide story in this collection. Colby Buzzell’s “Play the Game” comes close, but not quite. Perhaps the act of writing is somehow always bottom-line affirmative, though Georges Bataille would beg to differ. Perhaps the suicide note is just a tough genre to nail. But if you think so, you’d best read Ruth Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being. Freud famously argued that thoughts of suicide stem from homicidal impulses, redirected inward. Fire and Forget, I’m here to tell you, makes a strong case that the reverse is true as well.

6) Because the black hole at this book’s center is elsewhere. By the end, how many “hajjis” do we meet? The answer is crucial: next to none. Can you imagine, in this day and age, reading a book where the preferred word for a racialized other was, say, “chink,” “kike,” “gook,” or “nigger”? Let me be absolutely clear on this point: I’m not playing the censor, and I’m certainly not suggesting that others should have.

Here again, Fire and Forget has lessons we civilians have yet to learn. In the collection’s final tale, Roy Scranton’s “Red Steel India,” these themes are taken on directly, and it’s all about language. The doublespeak of occupation, we are taught, is in fact a pidgin, patched together from military acronyms, videogaming, curses in English and Arabic, and homosocial play. Scranton, in order to chronicle the lethal tedium of running gate security at a military compound in Iraq, creates characters, not just from our gang, but from the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps contingent as well.

“You like America?” I asked them.
“Ameriki?” the younger one said.
“Yeah. America good?”
“Yes, Ameriki good,” he beamed.
“Michael Jackson good?”
“Yes yes, Michael Jackson. Ee-hee. Very good.”
“You like Bush? Bush good?”
“Boosh good, yes.”
“How ‘bout Saddam? You like Saddam?”
“Saddam no good. Saddam Ali Baba,” the older one said, stamping his foot and spitting.” (222)

Not content to leave it at that, the narrator then takes a political position of his own, though not the one you might expect.

“Bush good, no Saddam?”
“Saddam no good.”
“Bush no good,” I said. “Bush Ali Baba.”
“No!” the older one said, aghast.
“Saddam, Bush, same-same,” I said. “Ali Baba, Ali Baba.”

By the time we finish reading Scranton, and the collection he helped edit, we aren’t surprised to see Chomsky’s For Reasons of State as his narrator’s book of the week. And we ought to have learned as well that, if the people who make their homes and lives in the Middle East are largely absent from Fire and Forget, well, that’s on us, not on the troops. When we sent them occupy other lands, they weren’t there to visit.

7) Because you never ate your spinach.
 


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