2025 BOOKS
OCTOBER
October 7th: Jarhead – Anthony Swofford
2003, 260 Pages, Treasure Paws Thrift
Following my arduous journey through The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I wanted something short and easy to read; as usual, I turned to a war book.
Most known for the film adaptation, this story seems very unique in the military history canon. Following, in a nonlinear fashion, a US Marine’s experiences before, during, and after his time in the Gulf War, this book has the basic structure of nearly every other soldier’s memoir: civilian life, boot camp, advanced training, deployment, war, discharge, and return to civilian life. Yet it isn’t really about any of that. I wouldn’t call it an “anti-war book”, it’s more like an “anti war-book”; it’s a book of contradictions.
It’s a war book but there’s hardly any combat, if at all. It’s about strict discipline and esprit de corps, yet the author hates being a soldier and hates being in the Marine Corps; yet he calls his platoon his family. Swofford was an elite soldier but also a screw-up. There’s an enemy and explosions and death, but they hardly see the enemy, the explosions are friendly-fire, and the death is caused by others, far from the sight of the soldiers. They’re heroes and important humans but they did nothing heroic and everyone knows they’re expendable. Really, this book is about the psychological change that happens to a soldier when they are trained to kill, sent to kill, and don’t kill – they wish they had killed, yet they wonder if they would be worse off had they killed someone, yet that very feeling of not knowing still haunts them. It’s a book about killing without the killing; a war book without the war.
I also must note the prose used. Swofford writes in a very matter-of-fact style that can be poetic at times, and at other times downright blunt; each chapter reads like its own short story. The tone is so terse and unfiltered it’s almost beautiful, even when he’s talking about the lonely insanity of constant masturbation in a state of cuckoldry or having a psychotic episode as he screamingly orders his comrade to shoot him in the head. It’s like an after action report, but the action is so naturally powerful that the facts speak for themselves; all he has to do is state the truth, and the fear, loneliness, humiliation, passion, cowardice, bravado, boredom, confusion, comradery – the desire to kill – all comes through.
I’m not sure my words can do this book justice - and I hesitate to speak too much about it since I have absolutely zero military experience – but there is clearly a reason that this book was made into a well-known movie; and a pretty dang good movie at that. Like I said, it’s unlike any other war story I have ever read.
Flipping through this book just now, I came across this quote that I think sums up the general sentiment of the story: “Troy says, ‘Nothing you can do about it. We’re jarheads, man, nobody gives a fuck. They want us to fight. It’s our job…”
October 10th: Ghost Soldiers – Hampton Sides
2001, 334 Pages, My Father
Still fighting off my hangover from Indianapolis, I felt compelled to stay on my war book kick; when I’m trying to drown out the voices in my head, nothing works quite so well as escaping into a story of incredible danger and the loud printed words of combat – it just makes all my problems seem so infantile and petty.
This book follows two parallel story lines: the POWs who suffered on the Bataan Death March and their subsequent imprisonment, and the 6th Ranger Battalion, with elements of Filipino guerillas, who ventured into enemy territory to rescue the POWs from Cabanatuan camp. Both are incredible tales.
The fate those POWs faced is difficult to fully grasp; it’s just horrific. For those unfamiliar with WWII, Japan was a highly militaristic society during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The Bushido code was bastardized by the government and military to brainwash the populace into a suicidal devotion to the empire; their youth were brutalized from a young age into complete submission and taught that their life meant nothing unless it was sacrificed for their country. This led to their utter rejection of surrender in warfare, an act of complete shame in their eyes. So, when the US surrendered on the Bataan Peninsula, the Japanese soldiers largely saw them as cowards and sub-humans; the treatment that followed is one of humanity’s greatest acts of inhumanity. If I remember right, Allied soldiers had a 4% fatality rate in the hands of German and Italian captors; for the prisoners of Japan, the fatality rate was 37%...
Men were decapitated for attempting a drink from a stream. Prisoners were shot for minimal reason, if any reason at all. Sometimes, simply being on the outside of the crowd could get you killed; Japanese going the other way on the trail would swing their weapon from their truck and strike a prisoner down. Medical care was essentially nonexistent; Allied docs in the camps would give their men placebo medication made from local plants just to give their patients the idea of hope, knowing full well they were doomed – doctors performed improvised operations with “vocal anesthetic”, aka, “It won’t hurt much”. Starvation was everywhere: “People lost their voices. People lost their hair. They lost eyes, they lost hearing, they lost the signal of their peripheral nerves. Their teeth fell out. Their skin fell off. They developed strange ringing in their ears. Rank metallic tastes soured the backs of their tongues. Their fingernails grew brittle and developed strange textured bands that, like growth rings in trees, reflected times of relative plenty or abject dearth.” Prisoners were reduced to walking corpses, looting their own dead for anything they could scavenge just to survive; some men simply traded all their possessions for cigarettes and smoked themselves to death. POWs died daily.
The actions of men in such conditions are astounding. Some Navy soldiers in camp hung a metal triangle from a pole and would strike it every 30 minutes to keep the time; just like they had done on their ships, in the old Navy tradition of “sounding the watch”. Prisoners made chess sets to have fierce matches or create DIY universities with more educated men lecturing others in mock classes; anything to keep their mind off their reality and their home so far away. One POW in Section 8, the psych-ward, would commentate fictional baseball games he imagined in his head; other prisoners would hide by his window and listen to the “game”. Another prisoner occupied his mind by building a house in his head, stone by stone and nail by nail – he would eventually return home and build his exact dream house.
I also have to note that the book covers another story involving an American woman who was in the Philippines during the occupation and set up a burlesque night club in one of the local cities. She posed as the madam but was really a spy, using her employees to seduce drunk Japanese into revealing military secrets that would be passed on to the Allies and aid in the war effort. She also aided in a smuggling ring that snuck valuable supplies into the prison camps, like basic medicines, food, and information. She was eventually caught and tortured but survived; what a badass woman.
The reason the Rangers, a relatively new and largely untested unit in the military, were sent to rescue these prisoners is equally horrific. As the US retook the Pacific, and General MacArthur’s Army loomed on the Bataan Peninsula, over two years after his initial departure – two years after those POWs began their imprisonment - the Japanese became erratically desperate with their prisoners. Weeks before the Cabanatuan raid, Puerto Princesa Prison Camp was massacred. The Japanese had filed all 150 prisoners into covered air-raid trenches and poured aviation fuel on them. They then proceeded to burn, suffocate, shoot, frag, bayonet, and slaughter the POWs; only a few escaped to tell the tale. To avoid a repeat of this massacre at Cabanatuan, the Rangers were sent ahead of MacArthur’s Army to rescue the prisoners before the retreating Japanese executed them.
The resulting mission was exactly what you would expect; against all odds, commandos rushed in with a surprise attack that wiped out the Japanese and resulted in the prisoners taking a long night-walk back to freedom. What I found particularly interesting was how some of the prisoners reacted to being rescued: they were reluctant to go. They hid from the Rangers, or fought them, or argued with them. Some refused to go or thought it was a trap. Others tried to dash away to grab their “prized” possessions (chess sets made of scrap wood etc.). More than one was bummed he didn’t have time to change into the one clean pair of underwear he had saved under the floor boards especially for his liberation day. It’s incredible what men can find important in life when pushed to the edge.
Now, I must include a bit of humor: one old, deaf British prisoner was on the can at the time of the raid; bullets flying everywhere and grenades exploding as he worked through a particularly bad case of diarrhea. Once everyone was gone or dead, he walked back to the barracks and fell asleep, completely unaware… I guess the old adage, “shit or get off the pot” can have some serious implications. Don’t worry, he was eventually picked up by locals and found his way to friendly forces.
Overall, I enjoyed this book; I mean, I read it in three days. Perhaps it fed into some sick “gore-porn” aspect of my brain that feeds off reading absolutely horrible acts; nonetheless, I think it is important history to learn and not forget. People throughout history have been through much, much worse than I will ever even come close to experiencing.
October 16th: Flags of our Fathers – James Bradley with Ron Powers
2000, 356 Pages, My Father
“We had no idea if this was a bad battle or not. One of the guys yelled, ‘Hey Lundsford, is this a bad battle?’ Lundsford shouted back, ‘It’s a fucking slaughter.’ Maybe two minutes later – Whoom! – we got hit with a mortar. I ducked and something dropped on my back and rolled off. It felt like a coconut or something. I looked down and saw that it was Lundsford’s head. Those were his last words: ‘A fucking slaughter.’”
Written by the son of John Bradley, this book recounts the lives – before, during, and after their military service - of the six guys who raised the flag atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima; the men in the now iconic image. Just to give context, this image was taken on the fifth day of fighting; the battle would go on for another 30 days. The flag raised in the image was technically a replacement flag; a smaller one had been raised earlier in the day but was replaced with a larger one. Two of the guys in the picture happened to be around and were called to lend a hand; Joe Rosenthal got lucky and turned at the right time to snap a quick picture of this replacement flag raising. “The Photograph” was picked up by the media and government and blasted to astronomical heights, appearing on war bond posters, stamps, and all kinds of media.
At first, I was nonplussed by this book; it starts with the author’s visit to Iwo Jima with his family and then goes into the childhoods of the six boys. However, once I got to the actual battle of Iwo Jima, I was captivated. By captivated, I mean completely gripped by my heart; this book constantly brought me to tears. At one point, I was reading in between sets of squats – I would read until I teared up and then squat until the tears went away and then go back to read more. As I said to my roommate while reading, “This book is so f*cking horrific.”
Every night on the island, Japanese “prowling wolves” would try to sneak up on the Marines for a stealth kill. On the night of D-Day+2, a few Japanese infiltrators got into the lines of the 26th Marines and jumped in a foxhole, bayoneting two soldiers: “Crull, a freckle-faced Irish boy not more than eighteen years old, was screaming as he died. And his words would forever haunt Meyers: ‘Mom! Mom! He’s killing me! Mom, he’s killing me!’”
One thing Bradley consciously does throughout this book is constantly refer to the Marines as “boys”; this is not a diminutive term in the slightest. He does this to remind you that these soldiers were in fact boys - being over 20 made you an old man to many – most of the soldiers were still teenagers. It’s truly horrific reading what these kids saw and went through: “…a nearby tank aimed its flamethrower at a bunker, routing the Japanese inside. As they ran for their lives, Howell cut them down with his machine gun. ‘They were just piling up,’ he remembered. ‘I was shooting them as fast as they came through. I got sick to my stomach; I vomited; I was a mess for an hour and a half. It was just the thought of what you were doing to another human being. They weren’t doing anything to me, and I couldn’t take it. It was different than shooting someone who was threatening you.’”
I don’t think anything I say can do justice to the testimony of the guys who were actually there. I don’t write any of this on a patriotic kick; not in the slightest. I simply want to put it out there because I think it’s important to know. I think if more people read accounts like these, we would all have a much different perspective on life.
Dave Severance, the leader of E company, had a wife back home who had a stillborn baby while he was on Iwo Jima: “Sometime later, Severance learned the bad news about a corporal in his platoon, one Dave Bowman, whose wife also was expecting. Bowman was giving a final briefing to the platoon leader who was relieving him so that he could head for the offshore transport and passage back home. As he talked, he was shot dead.”
That bullet ruined three lives: the corporal, his wife, and his future child. Nearly every bullet or bomb or knife that killed someone on that island - or on any of those islands in the Pacific, or anywhere during WWII, or anywhere during any war at any time - killed more than its direct victim.
One particular line that hit me hard was from Dr. James Wittmeier, Doc Bradley’s medical supervisor on Iwo Jima, speaking to the author: “You ever hold a broken raw egg in your hands? Well, that’s how your father and I held young men’s heads.”
E Company, of which the flag raisers were part of, landed with 310 soldiers; by the end, they had 50. They had suffered 84% casualties. The 2nd Battalion, of which E Company was a part of, landed with 1,688 men; 1,511 were casualties. Of those 177 who walked off the island, 91 had been wounded and returned to their unit. In total, 21,000 Japanese were killed while the US suffered 26,000 casualties. For the duration of WWII, the Marines fought in the Pacific for 43 months, but 1/3 of their deaths occurred in one month on Iwo Jima; it left nearly 6,800 graves in its wake. If you’re wondering why there were so many casualties, know this: the last two defenders of Iwo Jima surrendered on January 8th, 1949… That’s the kind of enemy they were fighting.
To highlight the odds these guys faced, and the issues they continued to have after the war, these are the fates of the six flag raisers:
Mike Strank, age 25, was killed by a shell from a friendly ship; the shrapnel ripped his heart out.
Harlon Block, age 20, was killed by a mortar; his last words, while holding his intestines, were, “They killed me!”
Franklin Sousley, age 19, was killed by a sniper; his last words, in response to “How ya doing?”, were, “Not bad. I don’t feel anything.”
Ira Hayes, age 32, died drunk and cold in a pile of his own vomit and blood.
Rene Gagnon, age 54, died of a heart attack while working as a janitor.
John Bradley, the only one to lead a semi-normal life, died at 70 of a stroke surrounded by his family in a hospital.
None of their stories are particularly unique for the thousands of men who fought and died with them.
As Leo Ryan, speaking about his friend Harlon Block, said: “All we had between the enemy and us was a pair of green dungarees. And I thought of Harlon out there leading young boys, sealing holes, fighting an unseen enemy, sleeping in a rocky hole. I wondered how many people think of the seriousness of this. So much is taken for granted. I hoped the efforts of guys like Harlon would be appreciated in the future.”
I leave you with this: Danny Thomas and Chick Harris were best buds; they were nicknamed the “Buttermilk Boys” because they were too young to drink alcohol on leave. When 19-year-old Thomas hit the beach, he saw his friend Chick in a strange position: back to the battle, head and torso erect, but his legs appeared buried in the sand to his waist. “As Thomas rushed past him, he yelled a greeting and saw Chick’s hand and eyes move, acknowledging him. Then Thomas glimpsed something else that made him fall to his knees in the sand, vomiting. The ‘something else’ was blood and entrails. ‘I vomited my toenails out,’ Thomas remembered. ‘I realized Chick had been cut in two. The lower half of his body was gone.’… ‘Buttermilk Chick’ was fifteen. He had lied about his age to get into the Marines.” After the battle, Thomas visited Chick’s grave and promised to drink a toast of buttermilk to him…
October 26th: Overlook – Matt McCusker
2018, 354 Pages, My Brother
My brother got me this book for Christmas waaayyyy back in 2024; yet another warning against collecting enough unread books to stock a small library. Taking a break from the horrible despair of WWII, I figured I would read a fictional novel by the comedic dawg that is Matt “The Shaman” McCuskies. Alas, this story was actually pretty sad.
The tale of five white-trash people in the cuts, whose paths become intertwined through drugs, petty crime, and blackmail, it was quite the complex web of developments that all lead to disappointment. For context, there’s:
-A stoner who wants to sell a big crop of weed to move to California
-A woman who wants to stay clean but lives with her drug-addict sister and can’t resist being a drug dealer
-An old, perverted private detective who was fired from the police force for sexual relations with a minor and is trying to track down a “missing” guy who is a local evil hippie
-An abusive vet who lives in perpetual racist rage
-And the vet’s teenage son who is all messed up in the head because he was raised by an abusive father
These characters get caught up in back-stabbing deals revolving around drug use, guns, money, and the evil hippie.
One thing that really stood out to me in this book is the idea of “imperfection”.
First, the book is likely self-published and there are numerous typos and strange formatting decisions; the book itself is imperfect. However, I actually kind of liked it because it made the book seem more personal. I could feel that this was written out of the head of a person that is not a professional writer; I assume Matt had zero profit incentive when he wrote this. The book simply exists because he wanted to make it, no matter how imperfect it is.
Second, every character in the book is imperfect. Most of them have admirable qualities that can be redemptive; however, their flaws get in the way of a better life. With this, there is more than an external plot acting against the characters; the characters are working against themselves. This makes for more depth in the story and room for character analysis, connection, and development.
And because of the characters’ imperfections, there are many parts of the book that are raw and realistic. For example, most novels don’t have a scene where an old man tried to masturbate in the early morning and struggles with erectile disfunction, or a scene where a pothead double and triple guesses himself as he walks to the front door of his date; but it’s ugly and believable.
Further, the structure of the book is interesting and adds to this raw connection with the characters: each chapter is told from a different first-person view. So the story continues in a linear fashion, but with constantly changing perspectives, each of which reveal the inner thoughts of the narrator. It’s a pretty clever way to tell a story and display the personality of the characters without having to spell everything out.
Now, the whole time, you’re rooting for the stoner guy and pill-dealing woman to get together and escape the neighborhood. They’re constantly going back and forth between really understanding each other and connecting and then getting into a big fight and hating each other; but you can sense something there. You want them to drop their petty differences, stop their self-destructive habits, and make it work. But, as with all the characters, their imperfections get the best of them and they fall into the traps of poverty and vice.
Spoiler incoming: In the epilogue, the woman comes home from her crap job and is about to snort a line of mixed, crushed pills to commemorate her dead sister’s birthday, when the young kid comes in with a package. It is addressed from the local penitentiary, assumingly from the stoner guy who is now serving time. Now, throughout the story, this woman has a bunch of dolphin figures in her house; the backstory is that when she was a kid, her mother, who is now gone and/or dead, would buy little dolphins for her two daughters in an attempt to show that she loved them. It’s a futile gesture but they saved all the dolphins throughout the house. So, when she opens this package from the guy in jail, perhaps the only guy who has ever felt anything close to love for her, it’s a ceramic dolphin that he presumably made in jail and sent to signify his romantic feelings; but as she unwraps it, the dolphin falls out of the paper, shattering on the floor…
She’s so close to holding love in the palm of her hand, if she can just grasp it, but she’s too clumsy and careless; it slips through her fingers and is gone forever on the floor of her poor, white-trash house.
The end was tragically unsatisfying and depressing. However, I enjoyed the read.
October 31st: Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
1855, 62 Pages, Treasure Paws Thrift
I had a few days left in the month and figured I would sneak in a cheeky little poetry book. Turns out I’m not a huge fan of poetry.
A short compilation of poems self-published in 1855, Leaves of Grass has an interesting history. While the first edition consisted of 12 poems, Whitman continually revised it throughout his life until the final “deathbed version” reached a staggering length of 400 poems. Originally written in response to a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay titled “The Poet”, that called for a great American poet, Whitman’s style was rather unique for the time. Using no real structure, rhyme scheme, nor meter, his poems are meandering and whimsical; further, the first edition had no author name, publisher name (same as author), table of contents, nor poem titles. It was just a small book of new American poetry. While I thoroughly enjoy that ambiguity, my favorite part of the entire book is the title: grass was a term used by publishers to denote a piece of little value, and leaves is in reference to a leaf or page of a book; essentially, Whitman self-deprecatingly called his book “Pages of Trash”. Sharing that sentiment with my own creative endeavors, I love it.
My edition was printed in 1968 and consisted of 19 poems; and, as far as I can tell, it only has one or two poems from the original edition. So, did I really read Leaves of Grass? I don’t really care; I’m going to say I did.
I’m also going to say that I didn’t really like reading this. Perhaps I’m dumb, or read it too fast, but I didn’t understand much of it. I think this was due in part to the archaic language from over 150 years ago, and also in other part to the nature of whimsical poetry. This style of poetry always seems like the author is so caught up in an esoteric thought in their mind and enjoying the playful usage of words that they simply dance around what they’re trying to say and fail to get to the point. This is not to say that I didn’t appreciate the tone of these poems – even without fully understanding what he was saying it still elicited emotions and voice in my mind – I just prefer the poet to get to the point and tell me some plain language. If you’ve read any of my own poetry that I have published here, you have probably noticed that I err on the side of hitting the point on the head with a sledgehammer until it’s a bloody, mangled, dead mess. Art is the expression of the artist’s emotions; but if the receiver of the art can’t understand the medium, it does nobody much good except the artist; so what’s the point?
While I wasn’t a huge fan of this reading, I must note the poems I did like. “I Sing the Body Electric”, while quite long and a bit confusing, has a great message praising the beauty of the human body and its inextricable connection to the human soul. While I didn’t really understand the point of “As Adam, Early in the Morning”, I did really like how it was able to put a feeling in my mind in such short time; I can’t put my finger on the feeling, but I know it was there and it was unique. I also enjoyed his praise of industry in “I Hear America Singing”; although I must admit it certainly cannot apply to modern America. Perhaps it’s the monkey brain I have from being a guy, but I particularly liked “A Woman Waits for Me”; while being, perhaps, outwardly erotic (especially when it came out), I enjoyed the bluntness and undeniable truth of the sentiment. Lastly, my absolute favorite poem of the collection was “Darest Thou Now, O Soul”; I’m not sure if it’s about death or the transcendent experience or both or neither, but it’s beautiful - the embrace of the unknown with your body and soul, separate and the same.
Lastly, I was looking forward to reading “O’ Captain! My Captain!” since Leslie Knope quotes it to Ron Swanson (the latter being one of my fictional heroes) but was sorely disappointed to discover that I – wait a second. I just reread it and understood it. Ok, I like it; I take back the beginning of this passage. The tragedy of surviving the perilous journey and returning to port, victorious and celebratory, but your captain, your father, is cold and dead, and you must walk his deck… I get it; I think…
I think the above epiphany shows that this book is meant to be read many times over until one can actually grasp the meanings.
Overall, most of my favorite poems where the short ones; they were easiest to understand and seemed the most powerful. The longer a poem went on, the less and less I understood it and the weaker it became. Coincidentally this comment comes on my longest book review post; ain’t life just funny like that.
Stats:
Total Books: 5
Average Year of Publication: 1975.4
Pages Read: 1,366
Pages A Day: 44