WHISTLES FROM THE GRAVEYARD

A former Marine Combat Cameraman recounts the hell of battle.

After high school, Lagoze arrived at a Marine Corps recruitment office to escape his teenage wasteland. Asked what he wanted to do, he replied, “Combat Camera.” That landed him the status of POG, a person other than a grunt, “the worst thing you could be called in the Marines….similar to a desk jockey.” What he filmed, officially, earned approval, but for his own purposes, he filmed forbidden things like Marines smoking hash in the field and fighting high—and, far worse, scenes of them mistreating human corpses and living animals. “You’re not a Marine until you do what Marines do, which is go to war,” writes the author. “Earn your strips. Get your Combat Action Ribbon.” War is, of course, hell; even though a fellow videographer assured him that Afghanistan was “a really long, messed-up camping trip,” it still felt like the worst place on Earth. Learning just how horrible it was—a realization built up over months in the field in a war “run by eighteen to twenty-three-year-old kids without college degrees and little on their minds besides getting some trigger time”—resulted in a surrealistic documentary, Combat Obscura, that questioned everything, including his own role: “In my head we were still good guys; not ‘the’ good guys, but still okay.” In fact, he concludes in a book that stands up next to Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, they weren’t OK, and they would never be OK again. One sign of the mental toll, notes Lagoze, was the veteran-studded attempted coup of January 6, 2021, which he links directly to foreign interventions that led radicalized young warriors to the steps of the Capitol.

Gonzo, ghoulish, and unforgettable: one of the strongest books yet to emerge from America’s misadventure in Afghanistan.