Title: Eat The Apple
Rating: 4 Stars
Eat the Apple is the story of Matt Young’s time in the Marine Corps. During his four years, he did not one, not two, but three tours of Iraq. Joining when he was eighteen, by the time that he left the Corps at the age of twenty-two, he was a completely different man.
His decision to join wasn’t the result of some grand familial military heritage. He wasn’t trying to avenge 9/11. He had no great sense of patriotism. He was eighteen, aimless, and, as a result of poor influences and media saturation, a pretty messed up idea of masculinity. If not for the Corps, he saw an alternative future as a failed husband, a failed father, an alcoholic, prejudiced, bitter old man.
Looking for father figures from the ranks of the Marine Corps probably wasn’t a top tier choice. Whether being physically and mentally abused during training by officers that have grown embittered, or the old salts of years experience not that much older than himself, or officers screaming about all of the ways that you’re going to kill your comrades, or your comrades incessant talk of masturbation and murder, the Corps is a noxious brew of toxic masculinity.
By the time that he first arrives in Iraq in 2006, the most serious fighting is mostly over. The patrols that he goes on are dangerous, but it’s not the aggressive, door kicking, block by block, sniper shooting fighting that had previously happened in places like Fallujah. He does go out on patrol and one of his comrades is killed. He gets injured when the vehicle he was riding in is blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device. He does not kill anyone and I don’t recollect him mentioning even shooting his weapon in anger.
Even so, this tour changes him. He talks about a person-thing that he develops. When things get really tough, this person-thing steps in and takes over. It removes all humanity from himself and everyone else around him. At one point, a suicide bomber in a car rams a Humvee. Remains of the bomber are strewn everywhere. Young (as the person-thing) picks up a piece of flesh and realizes that it’s the fully formed face of the bomber. Young places that face over his face like a mask and then leers and screams at the gathering crowd.
By the time he starts his second tour, the danger is even less. He has to seek out danger by doing things like sneaking close to a bomb detonation just for the fleeting moment of feeling alive. For the thrill of killing something, anything, he admits to shooting stray dogs. The third tour is even more benign. By this point, he’s basically serving as an honor guard.
By now, he’s been promoted to Corporal and is considered one of the old salts. Having reached this point, he now realizes how unqualified and unworthy he is to be a leader of men. In fact, one of his most raw confessions was describing when he intentionally preyed upon the most emotionally vulnerable Marine that looked up to him. By the time that Young was done with the Marine, he’d been kicked out the Corps, taken up a life of crime, and was dead.
During this whole time, he is alcoholic, self-destructive, reckless, and abusive. He is a man lost. Civilians that hear that he has done three tours of duty look at him as if he must be mad. He feels disappointed that he has no horrifying stories to tell. He tells one group of civilians that he never even got to kill anybody. It comes out nearly as a statement of regret. To make a better narrative for himself, he begins to make up stories of heroic exploits. Doing so gives his service some gloss to the civilians, but it leaves him even more adrift from himself.
In the last six months or so of his time in the Corps, he begins to clean up. Published in 2018, this book also reflects nearly a decade of reflection.
Not that long ago, I read Cherry, by Nico Walker. It’s the story of a man from an apparently normal middle class kind of background that joins the service, goes to Iraq, ends up addicted to drugs, and becomes an armed bank robber. It is a work of fiction but Nico Walker was an Iraq War veteran that, at the time that he was writing Cherry, was serving time in prison for armed bank robbery.
It’s probably hard to tell from my post this far, but both of these works are darkly humorous as the protagonist spirals downward. Both authors (at least up to this point) end up on a personally redemptive path.
Even though humorous, reading both of these books leaves me sad for an entire generation. Growing up in the aftermath of 9/11 and a nation seemingly permanently at war, it’s a generation that seems to be lost. Factor in such things as the economic pain of the Great Recession and the opioid crisis makes the picture even grimmer. The American dream of a family, house, and good solid job never seemed more elusive for an entire generation.
Flailing around, they seek out the military. Looking for stability, they try to find it from leadership that is not much older than them and who are, in all likelihood, flailing around trying to find that same stability. While trying to find it, they are sent off to fight a war that, by this point, no one really understands. Sent off on patrols with no real objective and surrounded by people that hate their presence, the military itself seems lost.
Having left Iraq and now in the process of leaving Afghanistan, it can only be hoped that future leaders will use our soldiers more judiciously.
The American dream has never seemed so far away for so many. In the aftermath of WWI, there was a different American cohort that was known as the Lost Generation. A century later, another one seems to be appearing.
dorkenstein 