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Get More Details tags: operation iraqi freedom(6), military(4), iraq(4), iraq war(3), war diary(2), war(2), fort lewis, army, ft lewis, cover, indie, buzzell
Product Description
A raw, edgy, nonetheless insinuate new voice from a front lines in Iraq-the many authentic we have had nonetheless from a war, heralding this generation's Catch-22.
Like many of his generation, Colby Buzzell was jumping from one dead-end pursuit to another, a paycheck divided from relocating behind home. He spent his time skateboarding and murdering as many mind cells as humanly possible. Tired of a monotony, he found himself in front of an army recruiter. Within months he was in Iraq, a appurtenance gunner in a argumentative Stryker Brigade Combat Team, an army section on a slicing corner of quarrel technology, and a initial of a kind.
This is a startlingly honest story of a immature male and a war. Trapped amid "guerilla warfare, urban-style" in Mosul, Iraq, Buzzell was struck by a bizarre, absurd, mostly frightening universe surrounding him. He began essay an online web record describing a war-not as it was being reported by CNN or in briefings on Capitol Hill, yet as he gifted it. The outcome is an unusual narrative, abounding with memorable scenes: a extreme firefight in that a insurgency came from "men in black"; chain-smoking in a ensure tower, counting a tracer rounds dismissed over a city; a raid on an Iraqi home during that a lady couldn't stop screaming as her father was being taken away; and a perplexity of a immature infantryman who had been upheld around from crew to crew since he was too fearful to fight. As a recognition of his "blog" grew, Buzzell became a embedded contributor a army couldn't control notwithstanding a best-and mostly hilarious-efforts to do so.
My War is a entrance of a uninformed and conspicuous voice, and it is already being compared to a classics of girl and quarrel Herr's Dispatches and Heller's Catch-22. But My War is many some-more than a quarrel story; it is a story of a era held between a hyper-reality of a technological age and an ever some-more difficult and dangerous world.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #437666 in Books
- Published on: 2005-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
My War is a book that will plea many of a many common assumptions about a Iraq War and a people fighting in it. Colby Buzzell, a book's author and a U.S. Army machine-gunner who did a year-long debate in Iraq, is not a stereotypical parochial infantryman from a Red State. He grew adult in San Francisco eating pot brownies during a Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, skateboarding, and listening to punk and complicated metal. He upheld Ralph Nader for president, reads George Orwell, and his father worked in Silicon Valley. But he was ill of his "life in oblivion," bouncing around from one dead-end pursuit to another. As Buzzell writes in his typically unwashed prose, "I didn’t wish to get all aged and have my bratty grandkids ask me, 'Grandpa, where were we during a Iraq war?' and me going, 'Oh, we was bustling doing temp work and information entrance for 12 bucks an hour.'"
In hunt of adventure, Buzzell assimilated a army and got sent to Iraq. First stationed in a ultra-dangerous Sunni Triangle, he fast mastered how to use a M240 Bravo appurtenance gun: "Just get behind that muthafucka and only glow it." His associate soldiers, mostly hip-hop fans or headbanging metal-heads like him, killed time examination porn on mini-portable DVD players or listening to Metallica on their iPods while on patrol. Long tedious spells were interrupted by furious fits of treacherous action. On one of Buzzell's initial missions, dual platoons dismissed thousands of rounds during nearby point-blank operation during an unarmed Iraqi civilian. Amazingly, he survived. Out of boredom, Buzzell started a blog, one of a initial by an typical "Joe" grunt in Iraq. It became a media prodigy and got Buzzell in difficulty with a REMFs ("Rear Echelon Mutha Fuckers") since of his less-than-glamorous description of a quarrel and his superiors, whom he accuses of constantly fibbing to a open and a soldiers underneath their command. My War might be unsatisfactory to readers looking for deeper introspections on a dignified questions behind a war, yet it is a flattering convincing box opposite a explain that all in Iraq is going fine. --Alex Roslin
From Publishers Weekly
With this relentlessly asocial volume, Buzzell translates his widely review 2004 blog into an episodic yet enthralling discourse about a year he spent portion as an army "trigger puller" in Iraq. Posted to Mosul in late 2003, Buzzell's crew was systematic "to locate, constraint and kill all non agreeable forces." Accordingly, his entries report practice posterior fugitive guerrillas (aka "men in black"); fast sniping, rocket and trebuchet attacks; and witnessing a occasional automobile bomb. Face-to-face fighting roughly never occurs. No matter: yet a quarrel scenes are exciting, this book is indeed some-more fascinating as a mural of a day-to-day life of a immature American infantryman who has "read, and re-read, large times, each singular one of [Bukowski's] books." Like Bukowski, Buzzell appears to be a nauseating misanthrope; he pours ridicule on everybody from cooks to generals to President Bush. He also despises a media, a antiwar transformation and everybody who thinks they know what's function in Iraq. That his superiors kept their hands off his blog for several months, however, shows they accepted that;despite a tainted language, griping, insults destined during aloft officers and occasional bearing of unwashed linen;Buzzell's work never unequivocally wavers in a description of American army as a good guys in a unwashed war. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a multiplication of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Buzzell was flapping by college in a classical demeanour when he decided, in an equally classical manner, to join a army. The knowledge was not utterly what he bargained for: he finished adult spending a year in Iraq as a appurtenance gunner. The book is formed on his personal blog, and it is rather tough to tell how many modifying it underwent on a approach to hardcovers. Buzzell spasmodic sounds like a equivocal psycho, and a people surrounding him, such as a infantryman fearful of quarrel who was changed from section to section since he was annoying a army yet would confuse it worse if they had to court-martial him, infrequently seem even over left into different territory. Buzzell has a excellent authority of a language, however, although, like many other bloggers, he rather overvalues spontaneity. It's too shortly to tell either he has created a Catch-22 or Dispatches of a Iraq War, yet he has created a book that stands utterly high in a novel of that dispute to date. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Customer Reviews
Most useful patron reviews
102 of 107 people found a following examination helpful.
A Volunteer Soldier's Perspective On The War In Iraq
By James E. Hill, Jr.
Colby Buzzell has frankly created one of a many engaging pieces of work in imitation currently about a genuine life fight in Iraq. This is not some "view from a top" yet a demeanour during a fight from someone who fought it as a immature infantryman with churned feelings about a troops investiture and with plain feelings for America and a purpose there. His essay is refreshing, his amusement is giggle out shrill and his discernment is immediately identifiable from those of us who have served a nation in a military. we served 4 years on active avocation with a Marine Corps from 1970-74 and left a Marines as a newly promoted Captain. Mr. Buzzell was a kind of thinker I'd desired to have had in my platoon. When presented with a mission, he gave it 100% each time, never losing his amiability and morals. For those who wish to know a law (and can hoop a truth), this book is rarely endorsed and will come to be famous as one of a best books to come out about this fight from an battalion soldier's viewpoint. He has my respect.
59 of 64 people found a following examination helpful.
F.J.H (the censored version)
By 91Ghost
I recently examination Anthony Swofford's examination of My War, by Colby Buzzell. Swofford, a former Marine sniper and Gulf War veteran, is a author of Jarhead, a successful discourse of his Gulf War experience, that has recently shown adult on a Hollywood large shade as a tip box bureau seller.
All in all, we consider Jarhead was a sincerely good read. Criticisms everywhere per a demeanour in that Swofford portrays a Marines-which for a many partial seem to branch from people who adhere to a view and disillusion that all things troops contingency be John Wayne like. There is though, an irritating overtone of fussy in his account, and an even some-more irritating spirit of invocation to a well-bred educational chosen (which seems to be his dictated audience), as if with a blink and a curtsy he straightforwardly validates that echelon's misled and misinformed perceptions and stereotypes of a military, and in particular, all-male fight enlightenment they so disdain.
The many saving peculiarity of his memoir, that was bright even improved in a movie, is Swofford's honest description of carrying never squeezed a trigger. In a initial Gulf War, there was positively no estimable purpose for light infantry, let alone snipers. While Jarhead might be a defining comment of a sniper's purpose in a Gulf War, it is not a defining comment of a war-which will be improved served by someone who directly participated in a armored blitzkrieg of a massacre that it was (i.e., someone from a 1 out of each 14 Gulf War soldiers who indeed did fist a trigger).
I'm not here yet to concentration on Jarhead, I'll leave that to a sophomore during Brown or Amherst or Dartmouth...as a former mud infantryman of a initial Gulf War, I'm here to 0 in on My War. we found Swofford's examination of My War to not usually be, atonement a pun, wholly off a mark, yet startlingly offensive. The crux of his examination seems to be a critique that Buzzell's essay is not seasoned and is not "literary" enough, and comes off some-more like a collection of blog entries...again, some-more supplicating, or shall we contend sucking up, to his Columbia Journalism Review audience.
Buzzell's essay is indeed not seasoned, it is charred and sizzling beef plucked true out of a fire-it'll bake we while it nourishes you. Buzzell's essay does maybe miss some kind of literary flourish-but so what? Again, when we examination Jarhead, I'm reading a witty, dry poetry of a University of Iowa Writers Workshop project-when we examination My War, I'm behind on O.P., in a foxhole with a associate dual year enlistee dog, deliberating life a approach that usually mud soldiers do. When we examination Jarhead, I'm sitting in a beginner artistic essay category being forced to listen to a immature highbrow examination his possess essay to a category in a painstakingly apparent bid to get into a pants of a beginner girls. When we examination My War, a right after a final arrangement and I'm adult on a third building of a barracks, with my BDUs still half on yet with a bottle of Mad Dog hoisted to my lips...
Swofford's several critiques are rather pointless, trifling, and rather irrational. He mocks a fact that Buzzell was a "typical Northern California stoner kid" who joins a Army in a standard way, finish with holding heedfulness to pass a piss exam and marrying for a additional cash...he mocks a accurate beauty of this book-it's steadfast and non-judging demeanour during a bland realities of a common youth soldier. Who a ruin does Swofford consider joins a Army (or Marines for that matter)?
Furthermore, and some-more importantly, Swofford seems to lessen a deepness of My War. He should know better. Many a Gulf War infantryman left a entertainment with a whinging and certain believe that their believe was yet a preface of something approach bigger to come...we knew we'd be back. We knew that "next time" we'd be going to Baghdad. The common retort was "next time, dog, it ain't goin' to be no joke." And it has not been a joke. For those of us who did grub adult Iraqi lives in a lane treads a initial time around, My War is enthralling in a approach that Jarhead never could be...we knew a dried massacre was giving birth to a surreal civic calamity that a soldiers now find themselves in, and Buzzell papers it for us in a denunciation we good know.
In time, story students and lovers of a literary will demeanour to My War as a defining initial chairman comment of a altogether Army believe in a Middle East, while Jarhead will righteously be upheld off as some kind of Tim O'Brian wannabe. Swofford's examination reads like a serious box of penis envy.
My War Rocks.
87 of 99 people found a following examination helpful.
Review from a Flag-Waver
By Larry R. Kephart
I'm a baby boomer from Colby's Dad's generation. a long-haired, tiny L libertarian in a Ted Nugent mold. we was a daily reader of his fight blog. When he sealed it down, we sent him an e-mail thanking him for his service. A few week's ago, Colby replied thanking me for my e-mail a year after a fact. That's it. Nothing about his book. we motionless to try his aged blogsite on a humour and that's how we found out about "My War".
I examination this book during my office. we didn't even put it down when my trainer stranded his conduct in a doorway unless he indispensable something specific from me, immediately. As others here have said, Buzzell's essay character is unique. It's transparent and concise, blunt during times. It's not a lot of feathery wordsmithing. You unequivocally can't systematise Buzzell or his writing. You have to believe it for yourself. we can't contend we "enjoyed" this book since It's not fiction. we did learn from it. we feel improved about a era following cave if there are a lot of Colby Buzzell's in it.
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