My War: Killing Time in Iraq
John Crawford
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Buzzell named his blog “My War” after the Black Flag song–because he liked the band and, as he writes in his new memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, it “sounded kinda tough.” It doesn’t take long to tell that he isn’t going to win points for literary art. A hard-drinking, hard-drugging California skater with a “Fuck the World” tattoo, Buzzell joins the army in 2003 lacking anything better to do. To his great surprise he gets shipped off to Iraq that November with the Stryker Battalion. Their motto is “Punish the Deserving,” but at his Mosul firebase Buzzell ends up doing mostly late-night house snatches and TCPs–traffic-control points, like drunk-driver roadblocks with insurgents as the quarry.
His blog entries–composed in the heat of the moment and apparently unedited–give the book an even more honest perspective, stripping away Buzzell’s FTW pose. The highlight is “Men in Black,” an epic post about a vicious ambush in Mosul. Probably one of the sharpest, nastiest accounts of a firefight ever recorded, there’s no artifice to it; it’s a brilliantly pared-down rendering of raw, panicked, white-hot terror. “We were stuck in the middle of a kill zone, all of us in 3.3 million dollar RPG magnets,” he writes. “I’ve put the events of that day in a shoebox, put the lid on it, and haven’t opened it since.”
There’s a coruscating rage to The Last True Story that’s missing in much of what has been written so far by Iraq vets. But what’s telling about Crawford’s account is that his anger is directed not at the war itself, but at the men keeping him there after the regular army heroes have left. He’s overwhelmed by the inevitability and ineffectiveness of the fighting. A comrade’s death fills him with inexplicable rage toward an Iraqi man working in the gas station near Crawford’s base. “I never wanted to hate anyone,” he writes. “It just sort of happens that way in a war.”
