thedrifter
03-22-09, 08:05 AM
books
Marine platoon leader's Iraq story is oddly dispassionate
By Elaine Margolin
Special to The Denver Post
The Denver Post
Posted:03/22/2009 12:30:00 AM MDT
When he was only 24 years old, the patriotic and newly married Donovan Campbell graduated from Princeton University and turned down corporate job opportunities to enlist in the Marines' Basic Officer Course, where he finished first in his class. Campbell did not want to be ordinary; he wanted to throw himself full throttle into an unforgiving universe where he could continually test his prowess. He soon got his wish.
Between March and September 2004, Campbell served as the commander of a 40-man infantry platoon in Ramadi, capital of Sunni-dominated Anbar Province in Iraq. During that time, Ramadi was a very dangerous place, a hot and crowded city of more than 350,000 civilians where violence was escalating.
Campbell's seemingly impossible mission was to weed out terrorist insurgents and simultaneously win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi citizenry. He and his men patrolled daily on foot looking for enemy combatants and weapons stashes and were often greeted with tremendous hostility from the locals. Angry and confused by their reaction, Campbell never seems able to get past his gung- ho Marine mentality and his dogmatic certainty about the right- eousness of his mission.
He often comes across as ethnocentric and peculiarly incurious about the lives of the Iraqis. He shows little interest in their culture or religion or their holidays and never ponders the genesis of their animus toward America.
Much of the book chronicles Campbell's thinking about what it takes to become an effective combat leader, something he is desperate to excel at. He is obsessed with how he appears to others, and overly consumed by the minutiae of his own daily performance.
Although one never doubts the sincerity of his intentions, he seems awkwardly obtuse when it comes to ascertaining the needs of other people, or figuring out how to get close to them. He paints for us thumbnail sketches of the men who serve beneath him, but the reader will have difficulty recalling any serious conversation he has with anyone during his entire time in Ramadi. He always seems alone, distant and aloof, accustomed to standing somewhat apart from the others.
Even when he is trying to describe the fighting he has endured with his men, a blurriness clouds his thinking, and he admits, "I can't even give a reasonable account of my own platoon's fighting, because most of the time my squads were separated from one another, without communication, in the middle of an urban jungle that had suddenly sprouted fire from all directions. I can't begin to describe the chaos, let alone try to make sense of it. My Marines and I fought house to house and block by block in a series of small, intense, mostly separate battles, and we experienced that day not as a linear, understandable progression of events but as a jumbled array of brief, intense snapshots."
Campbell witnesses horrible atrocities and is forced to make split-second life-and- death decisions.
For example, on a routine patrol, he comes upon a young Iraqi boy dying on the street. Campbell still remembers how frightened the kid looked lying there "about 15 years old, with curly black hair, and the very beginnings of a mustache tracing his upper lip, dressed in a black Adidas jacket and black nylon pants . . . he was lying down and his legs were twitching spastically. He had a neat red hole between his eyes." Without explanation or introspection, he tells us he simply "walked on."
On another mission that involved searching for a suspected terrorist, one of his Marines radios him to say that he sees someone with a gun slung over his shoulder that might match the description of the person they are seeking. He asks Campbell for instructions. Campbell responds, "Kill him," and the man is shot dead in the street. Locals quickly remove the body, and Campbell is left to ponder whether he just ordered the assassination of an enemy or an off-duty Iraqi policeman.
On another day, a Marine's poor driving skill result in the accidental death of several Iraqi men in front of their screaming children. He writes of his desire to "bend down and tell the little girls that our people had also been badly hurt, that none of us really wanted to separate them from their dads, that somehow every decision that we made in this crazy country always seemed a difficult choice between bad and worse." But once again, he confesses to remaining mute.
To be fair, no one can really be expected to psychologically survive brutal warfare intact without reconstructing it in their brains in some manner. War trauma has to be repackaged and redigested for personal and public consumption.
Sen. John McCain's proud stories of heroism never match the pain in his eyes or the stiffness of his body. Similarly, Campbell seems to be attempting to do that here, to reinvent himself and his past in a way that is tolerable, and this is no easy task.
There is the desperate search for meaning, the nagging pangs of guilt and the haunting faces of all the blown-up dead young men mocking his brave rhetoric and shallow platitudes. Unlike "The Things They Carried," Tim O'Brien's masterpiece about the Vietnam war that entered forbidden zones of thought and feeling about wartime experience, Campbell clings to the party line. He now lives in Dallas with his wife and young daughter and talks about his jumpiness around loud noises and his trouble sleeping.
Sadly, one senses that his journey to recovery is just beginning.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
Ellie
Marine platoon leader's Iraq story is oddly dispassionate
By Elaine Margolin
Special to The Denver Post
The Denver Post
Posted:03/22/2009 12:30:00 AM MDT
When he was only 24 years old, the patriotic and newly married Donovan Campbell graduated from Princeton University and turned down corporate job opportunities to enlist in the Marines' Basic Officer Course, where he finished first in his class. Campbell did not want to be ordinary; he wanted to throw himself full throttle into an unforgiving universe where he could continually test his prowess. He soon got his wish.
Between March and September 2004, Campbell served as the commander of a 40-man infantry platoon in Ramadi, capital of Sunni-dominated Anbar Province in Iraq. During that time, Ramadi was a very dangerous place, a hot and crowded city of more than 350,000 civilians where violence was escalating.
Campbell's seemingly impossible mission was to weed out terrorist insurgents and simultaneously win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi citizenry. He and his men patrolled daily on foot looking for enemy combatants and weapons stashes and were often greeted with tremendous hostility from the locals. Angry and confused by their reaction, Campbell never seems able to get past his gung- ho Marine mentality and his dogmatic certainty about the right- eousness of his mission.
He often comes across as ethnocentric and peculiarly incurious about the lives of the Iraqis. He shows little interest in their culture or religion or their holidays and never ponders the genesis of their animus toward America.
Much of the book chronicles Campbell's thinking about what it takes to become an effective combat leader, something he is desperate to excel at. He is obsessed with how he appears to others, and overly consumed by the minutiae of his own daily performance.
Although one never doubts the sincerity of his intentions, he seems awkwardly obtuse when it comes to ascertaining the needs of other people, or figuring out how to get close to them. He paints for us thumbnail sketches of the men who serve beneath him, but the reader will have difficulty recalling any serious conversation he has with anyone during his entire time in Ramadi. He always seems alone, distant and aloof, accustomed to standing somewhat apart from the others.
Even when he is trying to describe the fighting he has endured with his men, a blurriness clouds his thinking, and he admits, "I can't even give a reasonable account of my own platoon's fighting, because most of the time my squads were separated from one another, without communication, in the middle of an urban jungle that had suddenly sprouted fire from all directions. I can't begin to describe the chaos, let alone try to make sense of it. My Marines and I fought house to house and block by block in a series of small, intense, mostly separate battles, and we experienced that day not as a linear, understandable progression of events but as a jumbled array of brief, intense snapshots."
Campbell witnesses horrible atrocities and is forced to make split-second life-and- death decisions.
For example, on a routine patrol, he comes upon a young Iraqi boy dying on the street. Campbell still remembers how frightened the kid looked lying there "about 15 years old, with curly black hair, and the very beginnings of a mustache tracing his upper lip, dressed in a black Adidas jacket and black nylon pants . . . he was lying down and his legs were twitching spastically. He had a neat red hole between his eyes." Without explanation or introspection, he tells us he simply "walked on."
On another mission that involved searching for a suspected terrorist, one of his Marines radios him to say that he sees someone with a gun slung over his shoulder that might match the description of the person they are seeking. He asks Campbell for instructions. Campbell responds, "Kill him," and the man is shot dead in the street. Locals quickly remove the body, and Campbell is left to ponder whether he just ordered the assassination of an enemy or an off-duty Iraqi policeman.
On another day, a Marine's poor driving skill result in the accidental death of several Iraqi men in front of their screaming children. He writes of his desire to "bend down and tell the little girls that our people had also been badly hurt, that none of us really wanted to separate them from their dads, that somehow every decision that we made in this crazy country always seemed a difficult choice between bad and worse." But once again, he confesses to remaining mute.
To be fair, no one can really be expected to psychologically survive brutal warfare intact without reconstructing it in their brains in some manner. War trauma has to be repackaged and redigested for personal and public consumption.
Sen. John McCain's proud stories of heroism never match the pain in his eyes or the stiffness of his body. Similarly, Campbell seems to be attempting to do that here, to reinvent himself and his past in a way that is tolerable, and this is no easy task.
There is the desperate search for meaning, the nagging pangs of guilt and the haunting faces of all the blown-up dead young men mocking his brave rhetoric and shallow platitudes. Unlike "The Things They Carried," Tim O'Brien's masterpiece about the Vietnam war that entered forbidden zones of thought and feeling about wartime experience, Campbell clings to the party line. He now lives in Dallas with his wife and young daughter and talks about his jumpiness around loud noises and his trouble sleeping.
Sadly, one senses that his journey to recovery is just beginning.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
Ellie