"Best Memoir of the Iraq War" Topic

"I think it did. One of my themes is that the Marine Corps attracted a certain kind of individual, a romantic teenage boy who saw war as an adventure and not the horror it actually is. My core group of friends came from all over the place, but we were similar in this way. We grew up with 9/11 and the Iraq War playing on the television screen, and we responded to it with a hunger for something big. As you tend to do when you're young, you put people and institutions up on a pedestal. You're seeking an identity. You're still trying to figure it out and, hey, "look at the Marine Corps and these guys know exactly what they're doing." I was clueless as a kid, and yet I was drawn toward people who seemed to have things figured out. Marines were those people. And I thought, "if I could get a taste of that, there would be nothing in the world that could stop me afterward." I wanted the test, the rite of passage, which is something we seem to lack in modern society. Am I a man? Do I have worth? I wanted answers to these questions. Anytime somebody would ask me what I had going on, I would tell them I was headed to the Marine Corps and it felt good. It was a patriotic time in America, and people heaped praise on me and it felt good but it also felt like I didn't deserve it, like I was guilty for not having done anything yet…"

Review here

link

Armand

Well, I went over to Amazon and bought it on Kindle. It looks pretty good.

The sample was terrific. I'll put its on my list.

(smile)

Armand