TWIB-III 3: 10/27-11-2

[akujunkan]

Once more, one book.

1) Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green – Johnny Rico
The military must be a pretty strange place. On the one hand, it’s filled with boorish, uneducated, incurious, misogynistic, bloodthirsty bullies, and on the other, with sensitive, intelligent, inquisitive, caring-to-all-women, violence-hating New Men, who deplore the behavior of the former, and also happen to write books about their experiences in the military with that other type of guy.

Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green is a perfect example of the above. Author Rico spent several years in the infantry--one of them in Afghanistan--and although he’s quick to point out the faults of his fellow soldiers: verbal and physical abuse of women, juvenile antics, bullying of the local Afghan population, bloodlust; he somehow stays above such behavior, an attempt at authorial sleight-of-hand that doesn’t quite ring true. (For instance, if Rico’s such a scrawny sensitive guy, why the cover pic of the 300lb. He-man with the automatic rifle and kewl tribal tatts?)

Blood also suffers from the other major flaw of most similar memoirs: Rico wants readers to think he lived through Apocalypse Now and is the reincarnated voice of Vonnegut. Rico’s experience, while undoubtedly harrowing, was no Nam on roids; nor is his forced attempt at an ironically above-it-all tone particularly compelling, let alone funny.

It’s a shame the book turned out this way, because when Rico drops the pretense and simply writes about what he experienced--hours of grinding boredom, bureaucratic ineptitude and hypocrisy, and the less frequent, but much more horrible, outbursts of true violence and inhumanity--he tells a compelling story. Unfortunately, these passages are vastly outnumbered by the posturing described above. This is not the worst memoir to come out of the Bush-era wars, but it’s far from the best.


That will be all.

Comments

Johnny Rico?

[wombatdeamor.livejournal.com]

Is that really his real name? That is the name of the main character in Robert Heinlein's book Starship Troopers</>. If it's an attempt to be cute, it comes off as dumb, because I doubt he read the book. he probably only saw the movie. The difference between the book and the movie is the same as the difference between a bicycle and a bulldozer: they both have two wheels, but not a lot else in common. Jarhead was a good one though. It was fairly unapologetic about what being a military dude was like. I forget the author.

Re: Johnny Rico?

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

The author apparently legally changed his name to Rico after reading Heinlein's book as some sort of statement on life. Your sentiments, in a nutshell, mirror my reactions to Blood: the attempts at cuteness/humor/depth came off as juvenile, shallow and uncreative more often than not. Again, it's a shame the guy didn't just tell his story instead of trying to paint himself as some sort of massive intellect ironically above it all.