THIS MAN’S ARMY

A consistently engaging kill-and-tell tale of life in olive drab.

“Soldier X”—his name, the publisher promises, will be revealed when the book is published—is not your typical warrior, surely not the “uneducated automaton” that one young hotshot reporter from Newsweek apparently took him to be out in the mountains of Afghanistan. Soldier X reads Kant and Jorge Luis Borges: “Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished,” the Argentine writer observed, and Soldier X rejoins, vis-à-vis an atrocious enterprise of his own, “I resolved to view my own acts as inevitable. That man, I reasoned, was dead long before I stepped foot into the valley, and I was a killer long before I pumped four rounds into his torso.” He writes to an old classics professor that reading the ancient Greeks prepared him for killing, and for the prospect of his own death. And he thoughtfully explains, for readers who have not known combat, how cold and miserable and just plain frightening it can be: on every page, it seems, some soldier is vomiting in terror at the thought of what’s to come—and that’s just in training for the actual fighting, for a good chunk of Soldier X’s memoir describes his sentimental education as an Army Ranger, undergoing a program of instruction that, he was told, “physically took about seven years off your life.” Soldier X delivers sharply observed scenes from fighting on the ever-fluid front lines of Afghanistan, where he went to bloody the ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaeda—which in turn did a solid job of bloodying the Americans. He also offers learned commentary on various aspects of the modern soldier’s life, from post-traumatic stress disorder to the dislocating experience of being on the battlefield one day and in a shopping mall back home the next. (“When the kid at the movie theater box office made me wait for five minutes while he talked on the phone, I wanted to rip his trachea out.”)

Top-notch. Deserving of a place alongside Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, and other classic or soon-to-be-so tales of modern war.