Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs

from The New York Review of Books

By Michael Massing

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
by Nathaniel Fick
Mariner, 372 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
by Evan Wright
Berkley Caliber, 354 pp., $14.00 (paper)

OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War
by David Bellavia, with John R. Bruning
Free Press, 321 pp., $26.00

Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective
by Paul Rieckhoff
NAL Caliber, 326 pp., $15.00 (paper)

Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army
by Kayla Williams, with Michael E. Staub
Norton, 292 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor
Vintage, 727 pp., $16.00 (paper)

1.

In House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia—a gung-ho supporter of the Iraq war—casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,

a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.

This incident is notable mainly for the fact that the platoon stopped; from the many accounts I have read of the Iraq war, when a US convoy runs over a car, it usually just keeps going.

In Chasing Ghosts, Paul Rieckhoff, a graduate of Amherst who led a platoon of Army National Guardsmen in Iraq, describes going out on routine house raids in the summer of 2003 during which his men broke down doors, zipcuffed all the men in sight, and turned rooms upside down in the search for weapons, few of which they ever found. These raids, Rieckhoff writes, "were nasty business. Anybody who enjoyed them was sick. Sometimes I felt like I was a member of the Brown shirts in Nazi Germany." As Rieckhoff later discovered, some of his men were stealing cash found on these raids—a practice that, as other accounts suggest, is not at all uncommon.

(Continued here.)