AN OTHERWISE HEALTHY PERSON

Jansen reflects on his time in Iraq as a United States Marine Corps squad leader, the nature of war, and the ways in which his combat experiences transformed him.

The author didn’t have to go to Iraq with his fellow Marine reservists—he had already been deployed to the Republic of Djibouti in 2003, and could have declined. However, he had joined the Marines soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and considered going to war a part of the duty he had voluntarily accepted. In 2006, newly promoted to squad leader, Jansen was sent to Camp Baharia in Fallujah, a city “full of newness and excitement and foreboding.” A considerable part of his job there was to hunt down insurgents, a task fraught with danger and frustration. The author writes lucidly and poignantly of his experience in combat: He describes losing fellow soldiers as an emotional “hit that pushes all the air out of your lungs and keeps you from taking your next breath.” Jansen also writes affectingly (and without even a hint of sentimentality) about the challenges of returning home; as he struggled to readjust to civilian life, the author also had to come to grips with the news that his wife had been unfaithful in his absence. This account is distinctive among many of the other memoirs that have come out of recent American campaigns abroad—this isn’t a dour lamentation or a political jeremiad against American foreign policy. Jansen’s depiction of war, while unflinching, is bracingly evenhanded: “War is dehumanizing, but also fosters deep human connection that rarely happens in any other setting. It is destructive and also incredibly regenerative. It destroys lives, families, businesses, cities, and countries. But if we take an honest look at it, it also births all those things.” This is an admirably sober reflection, one brimming with candor and thoughtfulness, especially regarding Jansen’s “forever war,” the endless one that rages within one’s soul.

An impressively forthright discussion of war and its aftermath.