War Books Worth a Damn: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Although I obviously have not seen the movie yet, I can vouch for this book as being one of the best stories I have ever read of a soldier trying to make sense of life after War. You should definitely put this one on your reading list and make plans to see the movie, as it looks like a goodun’. -SF

The trailer for Ang Lee’s highly-anticipated “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” has finally dropped.

Sony Pictures has just released the trailer for the film adaptation of Ben Fountain’s award-winning 2012 Iraq War novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”.

A book widely regarded as one of the the finest novels about the war. In keeping with its literary origins, the film is — or at least appears to be — more nuanced than, say, “American Sniper” or “Lone Survivor,” focusing less on combat and more on the soldier’s struggle to reconcile that experience with life back home.

The film centers on a 19-year-old war hero, Spc. Billy Lynn, who embarks on a two-week “Victory Tour” with members of his unit after surviving a harrowing firefight in Iraq that is captured by an embedded film crew. To boost support for the war, Billy and the squad are ordered to take part in the halftime show of a pro football game, during which they begin to realize that they’ve grown disconnected from the country they’re fighting for.

“It’s sort of weird, being honored for the worst day of your life,” we hear Billy say in a thick Texas drawl at the opening of the trailer, as a somber rendition of David Bowie’s “Heroes” plays in the background to remind us, the audience, that being a hero is not all it’s chalked up to be.

The film has been generating buzz since it was announced that Ang Lee would be directing it. Lee has won two “Best Director” Oscars: the first for “Brokeback Mountain,” and the second for “Life of Pi.” But this may be his most ambitious project yet. Lee shot the movie in 3D, at 4K resolution, and 120 frames per second, with the goal of making the combat sequences feel as realistic as possible. This is the first time a feature film has been shot in what Sony is calling “immersive digital.”

Lynn is played by Hollywood newcomer Joe Alwyn, but the cast features quite a few bonafide celebs, including Kristen Stewart, Steve Martin, Vin Diesel, and Chris Tucker. The movie is due to hit theaters in November.

Read the Original Article at Task and Purpose

Military History: How the IED Rocked the Modern Battlefield

Brian Castner’s new book offers unflinching testimony of how the IED devastated the EOD community in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

The face of the man who wanted to kill me wasn’t immediately visible — the photo of him required close examination. My company commander took the picture while deployed to Iraq in 2005. On a noontime reconnaissance mission, he’d captured a million-dollar snapshot: a man in a ghillie suit emplacing an IED at midday. Except my commander didn’t notice; he only realized it when he returned to his outpost and reviewed the images. Under camouflage netting, in 100-degree-plus heat, a man lay perfectly still, as if staring down the camera — singularly focused. My commander’s unit never caught the man in the ghillie suit. I’ve never forgotten the image.

An anecdote in Brian Castner’s sweeping and meditative book, “All The Ways We Kill and Die,” reminded me of this story. Castner has written an analysis of the IED, its impact on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and its devastating effects on the explosive ordnance disposal community. Castner writes as a journalist and a scholar, but he also writes from personal experience leading EOD technicians as an Air Force officer. In one segment, he relates the experience of tracing a command wire from an IED site and finding the spot where the trigger man, long since departed, would have initiated the device:

The wire ended several feet inside the shoulder-high culvert. A large battery pack lay there, plenty of juice to overcome the resistance of so much copper between here and the bomb. No other sign of human occupation—no cigarette butts or discarded food scraps or sandal impressions in the dust—nothing to see, except this, which made my stomach flip twice:

…

Scrawled across the inside of the smooth concrete wall was a perfect depiction of our Route Clearance Patrol. Drawn in dark chalk as a profile view, like an ancient cave painting, each vehicle in the childish sketch was blocky but unmistakable: the smaller RG, the high-wire Husky, the fat Buffalo with a three-fingered stick-figure claw, the JERRV, a tiny Humvee, more RGs behind…

…

We looked down at the sketch. The JERRV [Castner’s truck] was circled in black and crossed out with an X.

That is to say, someone clever and daring wanted to kill him and his brothers. They even drew a picture. Castner comes to terms with an unpleasant realization: that the whole of human ingenuity and creativity, the brilliance of the inventive mind, was scrawling out a plan for his death in a childlike hand. Castner’s book is about the explosive ordnance disposal crews who worked to ensure that these bombers failed, but at its core it is an elegy to a brother-in-arms he lost when they succeeded. Much of the text is rumination upon the life and death of Air Force Tech Sgt. Matthew Schwartz, his close friend, killed in Afghanistan in January 2012.

book’s many strengths, perhaps most notable is its willingness to confront horror unrelentingly — furiously, even. In his description of Schwartz’s autopsy, he writes:

… Matt died from generalized trauma throughout his body. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt and combat harness, perhaps because they had just remounted after clearing an IED, perhaps because he hated it and had nightmares and didn’t want to get trapped in a burning truck. Whatever the reason, the collision of his body on the ceiling broke half his ribs, fractured his pelvis, and disconnected his internal organs from one another … every one one of the bones in his feet were liquefied, and bags of mush filled his boots.

There are many more recollections like this one. “All The Ways We Kill and Die” occupies a space somewhere between rage and redemption, a purgatory of loss reported as unflinching testimony. It is in many ways a messy work, evinced by both in its sprawling narrative and its willingness to confront the true mess of human conflict, the once-living detritus so often reduced to numbers. Witness, for example, Castner retelling in vivid detail the nightmare of a vehicle crew trapped in a burning MRAP by the bomb-proof doors:

The armor absorbed the blast, but the tire burst into flame. It melted through the doors seals and rapidly moved inside the truck, spreading through the flammable interior, a wind-whipped desiccated grassland of seat covers and uniform fabrics.

But, that’s just the vehicle. As for the crew, Castner says, “The meat slides off the bone like greasy pork short ribs cooked all day in an Alabama smoker.”

To call it intense is to cheapen its power. Castner’s writing is as horrifying as it is illuminating.

Much of the book is digressive as well — we learn of the birth of new acronyms and new airframes, of the stop-and-go careers of EOD techs and unmanned aerial vehicle pilots, of triangulated best-guesses about the bombers and IED manufacturers. I could have done without the fictionalized portions, which imagine dialogue and backstory about the IED mastermind Castner names “al-Muhandis,” or the Engineer. Weighed down by Pashto and Arabic loanwords, and by a desire to capture the speech of Islamists through direct translations, these portions seem more like orientalist exotica. And some readers may tire of the long digressions about military hardware. However, these are the rare moments when the book loses its momentum.

Otherwise, it is entirely riveting. Castner’s writing shines when he breaks down what he knows best into images: horrible, memorable, evocative, and searing pictures of the individual moments that amount to the worst (or final) days of so many lives. It shines when he talks about a friend whose leg has become a “nubbin” after amputation, with skin that “folds and puckers and sweats, creating boring abscesses that tunnel beneath fatty flaps and stink.” It shines when he describes the duty of an EOD tech running an X-ray on a conveyor belt of Pentagon fatalities from Sept. 11, each body more putrefied than the next, or how the same EOD tech became an amputee, how “seven years later he would still be examining the evidence of war, picking through body parts until he provided some of his own.”

Castner’s writing shines because of his willingness to hold his readers’ faces toward the abyss when they would rather turn away. We would all do well — as veterans, as citizens — to be so brave.

“All The Ways We Kill and Die” (Arcade Publishing, 2016) by Brian Castner is available for purchase beginning March 1.

Read the Original Article at Task and Purpose

Terminal Lance Creator sais He’s Just Getting Started with White Donkey

For all Veterans out there who served in Iraq, in particular, the Marines, you need to buy this book and read it a couple times. Fantastic is the only word that comes to mind. -SF

Terminal Lance creator Max Uriarte talks about his long-awaited graphic novel “White Donkey” with Task & Purpose.

“White Donkey,” a 284-page graphic novel that chronicles one Marine’s journey to Iraq and back, has taken the Marine Corps and military communities by storm. The work was widely anticipated, due largely to the celebrity of its author, former Marine infantryman Maximilian Uriarte, and is currently sixth on Amazon’s best books list after its first day for sale on the site.

A recent interview between Uriarte and Task & Purpose probed a central theme in the book: the main character Abe’s search for purpose.

“I wanted to get at the idea of what does this mean. What do you get from all of this?” Uriarte told Task & Purpose on the experience of joining the Marine Corps and deploying to a place like Iraq. Indeed, Abe is regularly confronted by a question of what he is searching for through his experience in the Marine Corps.

In an all-volunteer service that prides itself on promising young men and women a torturously tough experience, that’s a question that resonates with many young Marines and Marine veterans, including Uriarte himself.

Related: Terminal Lance just nailed how veterans will write the next chapter of American history.

“I always found myself searching for something and I could never peg what it was,” Uriarte said. “What I wanted to highlight [in ‘White Donkey’] is that it is really arrogant to use [a war like Iraq] as a platform for your own enlightenment.”

Using his own experiences as a Marine infantryman in Iraq perfectly captures the best and worst of life at the bottom of the Marine Corps’ pecking order. That reality is rife with nuance. It can be funny and self-depreciating, but terribly trying when forced through the gauntlets of youth, personal ambition, and — perhaps most critically — war.

Uriarte said he wanted to tell a war story that was less appreciative of war. “Even the most somber war stories glorify it to an extent,” Uriarte said.

“I wanted to do something different. I wanted to tell a war story that was more real, something where people would draw a greater understanding of what people go through when they enlist, what people would go through when they went to war,” Uriarte said.

Beyond that, however, Uriarte said he hopes the book’s story of resilience resonates with a new generation of combat veterans. In an email, Uriarte said he has lost four fellow Marines to suicide and described mental health issues as “an ongoing issue at the heart of this book.”

“It’s an exploration of the existential crisis of going to war, but also, I feel like if any one Marine reads this book and is able to identify with the characters and is able to reach for help, it would all be worth it,” he said.

In many ways, Uriarte is the perfect person to write this type of war story. Since launching his insanely popular comic strip Terminal Lance six years ago, Uriarte has become a sort of cultural icon for the junior enlisted Marine. Uriarte’s comics offer snippets of the nuances in Marine Corps culture easily shared by anyone who has ever earned the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. And they’re insanely funny.

Related: Here’s how a Terminal Lance comic strip is made.

“White Donkey,” however, is something more than that. The nuance from the comic strip is there, to be sure, if not magnified. The humor is undoubtedly there. But the experience of the book is something new from Uriarte.

It is not, however, something new for Uriarte, who told Task & Purpose in a recent interview that the genesis of the project actually predates his comic strip.

“I had always wanted to write a story about Iraq,” he said, adding that the story has been in his head since 2010, the same year he started Terminal Lance.

Uriarte funded the project through Kickstarter in 2013. With an original goal of $20,000, he wound up raising a whopping $162,681 among roughly 2,800 backers.

“It was insane,” Uriarte said of the support the project received online. “It was really humbling and flattering that these people had faith in my idea.”

Now that the project is finished, Uriarte said the feeling of being done with something he dreamed of doing for so long, and worked actively toward since launching the Kickstarter in 2013, is surreal.

“Finishing it was just like ‘what the fuck do I do now?’” he said.

For one of the most iconic and creative voices in his generation of military veteran, it’s a pressing question.

Uriarte told Task & Purpose he is preparing to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where he is going to launch his own animation studio.

“My goal has always been screenwriting and filmmaking,” Uriarte said, adding that he originally conceived “White Donkey” as a film, and he would still like to make an animated film from the book.

“I would love for this to be my first movie, but I have a lot of work to do to make that happen,” he said.

Read the Original Article at Task and Purpose

As a Vet, Here’s How I feel Watching Continued Fighting in A-Stan

Marine veteran Chris Jones, who served with the infantry in Afghanistan, reflects on the 15th year of the Afghan War.

Last year, thousands of Iraq combat veterans watched the country they’d fought in fall to ISIS. Days ago, a dusty city named Marjah made headlines after a Special Forces soldier was killed there. The same dusty goat trails and wadis I walked through for two years scrolled up the screen as I read of yet another American killed in a city American contractors built in the 1950s.

When I was in Marjah, a running gag in the platoon was the saying, “Well, at least we’re not in Iraq.” We were “surge babies,” part of the tens of thousands of Americans who’d enlisted after Obama’s troop surge. We’d been trained by men who’d fought in Iraq since 2003, men who’d intimately known places like Fallujah, al Asad, Ramadi, and Baghdad. For us, these were hallowed grounds, ones we were bred by the Corps to give a religious amount of respect. The Marines who’d fought there were heroes to us. No matter how brutal Marjah got, it was not the door-to-door bloodbath of Fallujah, not the vicious slug-out that was Ramadi. It was both a self-admonishing check on our hubris, ensuring that we did not get to full of ourselves in the beauty of our death dealing, and a quick moment of respect to those that had made us the Marines we were.

Related: For those who fought in Marjah, it was more than just a battle.

As ISIS surged across Iraq last year, I remember sitting on a couch in Manhattan wondering what it must be like for all the Fallujah veterans who were watching their old battleground be overrun by the modern version of their former enemy. I felt grateful that my city was, as far as I knew, still in the hands of the good guys. I desperately clung to the last shred of my “good war” mentality. I told myself that Marjah would be different. It was a long shot, yes, but somehow the Afghan army we left behind would hold. The local police we’d armed and joked with on patrol would find it within themselves to hold strong against the Taliban. I didn’t know if I could handle seeing what I’d spent four years doing be shown on live TV as having been for nothing.

ISIS is not in Marjah. The Taliban is. Because it is the Taliban and not ISIS, Marjah (and the rest of Helmand) will most likely not stay on the news. The Taliban aren’t flashy enough to warrant obsessing over during cable news coverage. After 15 years, American media has given up on trying to make Afghanistan sexy. ISIS puts way more production value into its work anyways, and this pays off in the media. So I won’t have to watch a truck full of Taliban rolling down Route Gorilla, past the compound I spent eight months in on CNN. I won’t see men in suits yell at each other on TV over how to stop the Taliban. I won’t watch the Afghan army be ridiculed for cowardice by TV pundits who’ve never shoved their head in a ditch while bullets sing to them. I won’t have to hear 20-somethings in the Upper West Side widen their eyes and gasp at each other about how horrific the latest Taliban killing video was, but ohmygosh, it looked just like a movie.

But I did pull out the map I brought back from Helmand and traced the route that Special Forces soldiers would have had to drive down to rescue their friends last week. I did watch the last 30 minutes of a documentary about the Afghan army in Helmand. I did stare blankly at a friend over a cigarette and coffee, and while he talked, I thought only of Marjah.

But hey.

At least it wasn’t Iraq.

Read the Original Article at Task and Purpose