Dodging the Bullets with Sebastian Junger

In the early pages of War, Sebastian Junger clinically details the chances of dodging a bullet during a firefight. As he did in The Perfect Storm when describing what it's like to drown (The heart labors under critically low levels of oxygen and starts to beat erratically--"like a bag full of worms," as one doctor says), Junger dissects the vital organs of combat, lacing combat boots on the reader for a visceral you-are-there reading experience.  Granted, I haven't finished the book, but at the midway point, I'm not afraid to go out on a limb and say this is the standard by which combat narratives should be judged.

Back to the bullets.  Junger's book follows a unit of soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade through a hard-fought year of war in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley.  Junger himself is there alongside them for most of that time, so he knows exactly how the sound of a bullet can be transcribed ("the terrible snap and buzz") and what it's like to treat a wounded soldier who's bleeding out ("when he cuts the sleeve off Vandenberge's uniform another two or three cups of blood spill out").  Just as gripping as the accounts of Battle Company's firefights are the interludes where Junger pauses the narrative to take a wider view.  Now, the bullets:

The enemy fighters were three or four hundred yards away, and the bullets they were shooting covered that distance in about half a second--roughly two thousand miles an hour.  Sound doesn't travel nearly that fast, though, so the gunshots themselves arrived a full second after they were fired.  Because light is virtually instantaneous, illuminated rounds--tracers--can be easily perceived as they drill toward you across the valley.  A 240 gunner named Underwood told me that during the ambush he saw tracers coming at him from Hill 1705 but they were moving too fast to dodge.  By the time he was setting his body into motion they were hitting the cedar log he was hiding behind.  The brain requires around two-tenths of a second just to understand simple visual stimuli, and another two-tenths of a second to command muscles to react.  That's almost exactly the amount of time it takes a high-velocity round to go from 1705 to Aliabad.


Reaction times have been studied extensively in controlled settings and have shown that men have faster reaction times than women and athletes have faster reaction times than nonathletes.  Tests with soccer players have shown that the "point of no return" for a penalty kick--when the kicker can no longer change his mind about where to send the ball--is around a quarter of a second.  In other words, if the goalkeeper waits until the kicker's foot is less than a quarter second from the ball and then dives in one direction, the kicker doesn't have enough time to adjust his kick.  Given that quarter-second cutoff, the distance at which you might literally be able to "dodge a bullet" is around 800 yards.  You'd need a quarter second to register the tracer coming toward you--at this point the bullet has traveled 200 yards--a quarter second to instruct your muscles to react--the bullet has now traveled 400 yards--and half a second to actually move out of the way.  The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap.  That's the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.

We all flippantly toss around the phrase "dodging a bullet."  Your cousin who ate the egg salad left too long in the sun at the family reunion: "Marybeth didn't have to go to the hospital or nothin'--just a bad case of stomach cramps.  She sure dodged that bullet!"  Or a certain unnamed Homecoming Queen I stalked in high school: fearful I was going to ask her to the junior prom, she really dodged a bullet when football captain Scott Turnbull sealed the deal before I could work up the nerve to stammer out the words "What are you doing Saturday night?"

I never dodged any bullets during my ten months in Iraq.  As a certified, Grade-A Fobbit, I was safely entrenched behind the concertina wire, the manned checkpoints, the Hesco barriers, and the air-conditioned buffer zone of the headquarters building.  I never patrolled a street, never had the misfortune to be on the wrong end of a sniper's bullet, never heard the snap-buzz cracking over my head (the flickering fluorescent lights don't count).

Oh, we talked about dodging bullets all the time, there in the task-force headquarters.  "Wow, did you see the commanding general this morning?  Somebody must've pissed in his Corn Flakes!  Glad it wasn't me.  Dodged that bullet this time, huh?" or "Hajji was a little off on his aim this morning and the mortar landed in an empty field just outside Camp Liberty.  Score another one for the Bullet-Dodger's Club!"

But I'm sobered reading Junger's book.  There were--and are--soldiers weaving and ducking enemy rounds out there on the streets of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan.  While I sat in my air-cooled cubicle, surfing the Internet and trying to decide if, after I got off shift, I should take a shower first and then watch a movie, or watch the movie first and then take a shower, somebody somewhere was turning into a bullet sponge.

Books like Junger's make me think--not for the first time--about the dichotomy of my Army career.  I was a warrior in name and uniform, but one far, far removed from the buzz of bullets.  I hope to capture some of this disconnect in Fobbit, but it won't change the fact that I was a sergeant who watched the war from his computer screen.

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A couple of other notes about Junger while we're on the subject:

1.  Galley Cat talks to him about writing and marketing the book:  "I think there was skepticism in the publishing industry about another war book."  (Uh-oh.)

2.  At Powell's Books's blog, Junger writes about the post-war war with PTSD and re-assimilation into society.  I also liked this:  One of the soldiers in the platoon said to me, "You've explained us to ourselves."  That was about the best review I could imagine getting.

3.  Graeme Wood has a nicely-balanced review over at The Barnes and Noble Review:  The book is less about fighting with the brain than about fighting with the muscles and glands, and taxing them beyond what they can normally sustain. The soldiers with whom Junger embeds do not care about politics.

4.  After reading even halfway through the book, this video is about the most disheartening thing I've seen on YouTube in a long time:



Anyway, I urge you all to buy War (insert bad G. W. Bush joke here).  Read it and weep.

Done. For now.

Last night at 8:34, I typed one more word, hit the period key, then sat back and exhaled a breath I'd been holding for a little over four years (which is a really, really long time!).

This was it.  The end of the first draft of Fobbit.  It's bigger than a breadbox (203,310 words; 674 pages), but smaller than Moby-Dick.  I came in a little shorter than I'd earlier predicted, but I have no doubt the end result will be vastly different in height, weight and hair color.

As I poured a glass of celebratory Riesling, my wife said, "I'll bet you're excited."

"Excited" isn't quite the word.  Relieved, unsettled, worried, and hopeful are more like it.  When I look back on what I've got sitting in that massive file, I know there is a lot of work ahead: I need to stitch holes in the tattered plot and plump up characters who are currently so emaciated they're on an intravenous drip.  There are problems galore, but I'm encouraged by something Anne Lamott wrote in Bird by Bird:  For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

Onward and upward!

By the way, it just occurred to me that I jumped into this blog so suddenly I never really described what the novel is about.  Here's a shot at the proverbial "elevator pitch" (describing a book to a publisher before the elevator stops at his top-floor office):

Army public affairs soldiers, led by an inept officer prone to nosebleeds, muddle their way through the Iraq War, living the good life as "Fobbits" (soldiers who never leave the protection of the Forward Operating Base) while agonizing over paper cuts, inter-office politics, and writing the most-cheerful news release about casualties.  Contrasted with the Fobbits, the novel also follows a company of soldiers who patrol the streets of Baghdad, dodging sniper bullets, grenades, and rocks tossed by angry Iraqis.  Eventually, the two worlds collide in a climax both humorous and tragic.

Like the novel itself, that pitch needs a lot of work, but you get the idea.

Put another way, I guess you could say, It's as if The Hurt Locker married The Office and they had a kid named Catch-22.

[UPDATE, 5/17/2014:  Now, of course, you can hold Fobbit the Book in your hands.  The novel was published by Grove/Atlantic in September 2012--in a much leaner, meaner, greener version than the 674-page bloated draft I was so proud of four years ago.  More information on the book and where to buy it can be found at this webpage.]

Andalusia Pilgrimage: A Confession of Obsession

Interesting news earlier this week from Andalusia, Flannery O'Connor's farm in Georgia:  the peacocks have laid eggs.  While not an announcement on the same level as capping a leaking oil well or publicly admitting that you, the governor of South Carolina, funded your adultery with taxpayer dollars, the fact that pea-eggs have been discovered in the grass at Andalusia is important to the small circle of us who live and breathe All Things Flannery.

Peacocks were once the kings of the barnyard at the O'Connor farm, overrunning the place to such a degree that when editor Robert Giroux paid his author a visit, he recalled being picked up at the front gate and driving up to the house: "The car was going about five miles an hour up this road.  As we drove in she had about thirty peacocks strutting around.  They're very beautiful, but very stupid, and their trains were trailing.   They were so slow that the car would run over the trains."

Flannery had long been fascinated by birds, starting when, as a six-year-old, she taught a chicken to walk backward.  Peacocks, "with tails that resembled maps of the solar system" (as described by Brad Gooch in Flannery: A Life), eventually became her obsession.  In 1952, shortly after being diagnosed with the lupus that would kill her 12 years later, she ordered her first pair of peafowl.  With their frightening, rusty shrieks and dazzling display of tailfeathers, the peacocks came to symbolize the terrifying mysteries contained in her stories.  In one, she describes a character as having "eyes as blue as a peacock's neck."  As Craig Amason, the current director of Andalusia, once noted: "She knew the importance of the bird."

The birds, then, are the closest we can come to touching Flannery.  If you're into obsessing about the talismans of writers, that is.

The birds currently strutting around Andalusia are not descendants of the original flock.  After Flannery's death and the subsequent slow decay of the farm, those birds were scattered around Georgia: pairs went to live at Stone Mountain, a cancer center in Atlanta and at a monastery in Conyers.  About a year-and-a-half ago, the Andalusia Foundation decided to repopulate the farm with peacocks, hoping it would give visitors a taste of what it was like during the Flannery era.

There were no rusty-doorhinge screeches from the trees when I pilgrimaged to Andalusia four years ago.  But I didn't need the birds to give me the shivers--I already had that enduring chill from a two-decade obssession with Flannery and her fiction.  I've written about that odd and pitiable obsession elsewhere on the web, so I won't go into how my first reading of The Violent Bear It Away made my hair stand on end, "follicles like exclamation points."

This, then, is what it's like living at the outer limits of obsession.  For those of you un-baptized in the spirit of fanaticism, you should know it is possible to absorb so much of a writer's life and work that you start adopting an unnatural familiarity with someone who died when you were still in diapers--life-size posters on your wall, calling her "Flan" in your most intimate moments, drunk-dialing random numbers and yelling "The life you save may be your own," that sort of thing.  With apologies to my wife, there was indeed a time in my life when I was googly-eyed for Flannery.  That particular fever has since passed, but I still regard her works as pillars which hold up the roof of my own fiction.

But back to Andalusia.  You know how some folks plan a lifetime for a trip to Paris or Bali-Bali?  That was me with the O'Connor farm.  When the Army sent me to Fort Stewart, Georgia in 2004, I finally found my chance.  I was too busy with pre-deployment training and the subsequent year in Baghdad to make my way to Milledgeville, but once I got back and shook off the Iraqi dust, I started making my plans.

Here is my journal entry for that day:

July 1, 2006:  This is the moment I’ve been anticipating for fifteen years. The car, softly bouncing along the rutted dirt road tops a small rise, passes through the wooden-gated opening and there, off to the right, is the white house tucked among the tall shade trees, the wide, screened-in porch beckoning like a cupped hand waving us forward.

Andalusia.

I have finally made my Flannery O’Connor pilgrimage to Milledgeville, Georgia.

Jean and I rose at a Godawful ungodly hour, got in the car and drove the three hours to Milledgeville. I’d planned out the route on Mapquest.com, but chose the “shortest route” (rather than the “fastest route”) option so that we could save on 50 miles worth of gas. This turned out to be a nearly disastrous mistake because, after we got off I-16 and then another couple of state highways, we found ourselves going down a deserted one-lane dirt road. The red-clay track led through thick, insect-buzzing woods and there was not another car, house or even telephone wire in sight. We crept down the road at 40 miles per hour for about ten miles, our car pluming a red cloud of dust, and both of us getting increasingly nervous by the minute, thinking that Mapquest was leading us to our doom. We saw a burnt-out carcass of machinery off in the ditch to the right and cracked a joke about how the hillbillies preyed on unsuspecting travelers who depended on the internet for everything. I sang the banjo-twang song from “Deliverance.” At two separate times, sleek, tan does bounded across the road in front of us. Jean fretted about how we should call our daughter and have her retrieve the downloaded Mapquest route from my computer.  "That way, if we don’t return, she’ll know where to look for the bodies.”

“Wait,” I said. “What’s that up there? Is that a Stop sign?”

It was, indeed. And there was a paved highway, cleanly bisecting our dirt road of doom.  Mapquest told us to take a left and soon we were back in civilization once more.

Sort of.

We needed to stop for gas and pulled into the first station we found—a dusty yard with three pumps on an island in front of the squat little mini-mart whose windows were crowded with lottery stickers and Salem cigarette ads. I told Jean I needed to use the restroom while she pumped. When I entered the store and made my way past the racks of bagged peanuts, sausage sticks and Moon Pies, I was confronted with a line of Locals, all of them in their sixties or seventies and all of them wearing John Deere caps and not-recently-laundered T-shirts. They perched on stools along a short counter in front of a grill where a cook was scrambling up eggs and burgers. The Locals eyed me—me, in my ironed shirt and city-slicker shorts and tennis shoes—and there was a barely-perceptible pause in their conversation. The grill sizzled in the half-beat silence. One of the good ole boys nodded at me and said, “How you?”

“Fine,” I said. “Fine, thanks.”

I hurried into the bathroom, did my business (or “bid’ness”) then hurried back out to protect Jean while she pumped and paid and we sped away after buying a bag of salted cashews and a Diet Coke. She wanted to buy a plastic baggie of boiled (“bolled”) peanuts which were sitting at the register, but I talked her out of it, later telling her, “We have no idea how long they’ve been sitting there.”

We had a good (nervous) laugh about the gauntlet of Locals back at the gas stations.

“Yep,” I said, “we’re definitely in Flannery Country now. Them there was Good Country People, fo sho.”

We arrived at Milledgeville, browsed the antique shops, ate lunch, then I said, “Okay, it’s time.”   My voice quivered as I spoke.  We headed north out of town on Highway 441 and there, sandwiched between a Honda dealer and a row of motels, was the driveway with a small brown sign pointing the way to Andalusia.  I drove slowly down the dirt road, topped the rise, and had my first glimpse of the white country house where Flannery wrote Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away and nearly all of her short stories. We drove around behind the house and parked in the grassy field.

The afternoon air was thick and hot, too hot for even a decent insect buzz.  We walked up the steps to the screened-in porch and I stepped inside the Main House. Craig Amason, the Foundation Director, was there to meet us. He told me everything I already knew, and I nodded politely with feigned interest.  The tour guide babble was all superfluous for me.  I was here to breathe in the molecules of Flannery, which floated like dust motes in the air.

He paused in his spiel about the long-gone peacocks.  “Just out of curiosity, how’d you hear about Andalusia?”

I looked at him and grinned. “Mister, I’ve been waiting to get here for fifteen years.  You have no idea.”

At that point, a trio of loud-mouthed ladies swept onto the property and bullied their way through the front door.  It was as if Mrs. May, Julian's mother, and the Grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" had conspired to gang up on my pilgrimage to the Shrine.  I suppose they would have been good women....if somebody had been there to shoot them every minute of their lives.

Jean and I slipped away to explore the rest of the house on our own.

Most of the farmhouse was roped off—the front staircase leading to the second floor, the parlor, Flannery’s bedroom directly to the left of the front door—but I stood in each of the doorways for many long minutes, absorbing the ghost of Flannery.  Deep down, I knew this would not make me a better writer.  Being here would not fortify my fiction with eight essential vitamins and minerals.  But yet, there was something about standing witness to her environment where she practiced "the habit of being" even as disease weakened her body.  She once wrote: "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing."  If she could do it, so could I.

Somewhere, beyond the flapping gums of the ladies behind us, I could hear the click of her crutches as she advanced to meet me. I stared at her desk (“Not the original, unfortunately,” the director said) and the typewriter (“Again, not the original, but one just like it”) which were positioned to the left of the bed (the original) and in front of the window. Flannery would sit there every morning, the morning light streaming through at her back, and peck away at the typewriter, rattling out her message of faith and violence and goddamngreat prose, sending a message to me forty years in the future. I asked the director if the books in the glass bookcases were hers, and he affirmed that they were (“Though the bulk of her private library and papers are at the college, of course”). The velvet rope kept me from entering the room, cocking my head, and reading the spines of the books, but just knowing that they were hers was pretty thrilling. I stared at her silver crutches leaning against the un-original desk. I stared at the curtains her mother Regina had sewn. I looked at the cracks running along the wall, meeting the ceiling, then spreading out in spidery veins. I thought about water stains in the shape of the Holy Ghost descending along the wall.

Jean bought me a T-shirt and we left the house, the three biddies still clucking at the director, trapping him into false good manners and a strained smile.

We walked around the grounds, me stopping to pose on the porch and in front of the house, Jean worrying about snakes as she stepped in her sandals through the crackly undergrowth near the stone birdbaths, both of us poking our heads into the ruins of the caretakers’ house, the equipment shed, the cow barn and the milk shed. Then we left, just barely escaping ahead of the three ladies in their large SUV.

I turned to Jean, “Now I can die. I’ve been to Andalusia.”

The Dusty Shelves of Unread Books

At The Millions, Kirsty Logan dreams about the enticing possibilities of the 800 unread books on her shelves.  To which I say, "800?  Feh!  What an amateur!"  The number of unread volumes in my basement library stretches into the thousands, as documented on my Library Thing profile.

Still, Logan has some interesting things to say about the excitement and potential of an unread book.

Sometimes I hold these books in my hands and imagine what I will learn from them. These books have affected my writing, and I haven’t even read them. Maybe we can learn as much from our expectations of a story as we can from the actual words on the page.

Frankly, I rarely think about the unexplored worlds of unturned pages.  Occasionally, I am overjoyed by what I find.  For instance, there was the sensation of being blown to bloody smithereens when I finally read The Catcher in the Rye nine years ago.

But, for the most part, I am constantly nagged by the growing list of books I feel I should read.  This reader's guilt grows from arrows shot my way from years in academia, lists of "Top 100 Must-Reads" from media critics, and, okay I'll admit it, the enticing cover art and blurbs on newly-acquired books.  I spend my days swimming against the flood of books flowing into my house, struggling to keep up with the demands of review assignments and the whims of my wandering attention span which pull me toward one book or another.  "Look, here's a new translation of Tolstoy!  And, my oh my, doesn't that new Elmore Leonard look tasty?"  I really want to read Ulysses.  I really, really do.  But since I haven't yet invented the hermetically-sealed reader's pod (complete with massage chair and automatic coffee dispenser), I keep putting it off for the tomorrow after tomorrow.  Poor James Joyce, he's been pouting from his perch on my bookshelf for years now.  He's not alone.  Scoot over Jimmy and make room for Proust, Dreiser, and Miss McCullers.

Here then, are those books currently residing on my very dusty shelves which have been begging me for years to take them down and crack their spines.  I've divided the list into two parts between the established canon and those more recent (i.e., within the past 40 years) books which have piqued and tweaked my interest.  I've also added a section for fresher books--those released in the last few years.  It's an eclectic list populated by authors I've yet to meet, with only a few exceptions--Joyce, Cather, Nabokov, Proulx.  (Note: when I say "Anything by...", I really mean "Something by...").  They're in roughly the order of my desire to read them.

The Classics
Ulysses by James Joyce
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Anything by Marcel Proust
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Stories of John Cheever
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Anything by P.G. Wodehouse
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Anything by Thomas Hardy
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Anything by JRR Tolkien
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Little Big by John Crowley
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Anything by Sinclair Lewis
Anything by Upton Sinclair
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey


Recent Releases
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Anything by Marilynne Robinson
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathon Safran Foer
Among the Missing by Dan Chaon
Half in Love by Maile Meloy
Close Range by Annie Proulx
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Anything by Chuck Palahniuk
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Anything by James Ellroy
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander
Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Anything by Margaret Atwood
Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Deliverance by James Dickey
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Possession by AS Byatt
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
Waiting by Ha Jin
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Wicked by Gregory Maguire


New-ish Releases
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
The New Valley by Josh Weil
The Language of Elk by Benjamin Percy
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Sunnyside by Glen David Gold


As you can see, I'm in desparate need of sudden wealth, unlimited time, and a desert island.

So what about you?  What books have you been meaning to get around to....someday?  Post your list in the comment section below.