In the magazine Stop Smiling (Issue 25) there is an interview with John Crawford, another National Guardsmen plucked for Iraq who wrote extensively while stationed in Baghdad from late 2002-2003. Crawford was two credits away from graduating from Florida State when he was called up, and while in Baghdad an embedded journalist who read bits of Crawford’s writing put the soldier in touch with a literary agent. Crawford’s book is The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq, and while I wait on interlibrary-loan, here’s a bit from the Stop Smiling interview. Crawford expresses the mentality of hate and frustration felt as a foreign soldier in Iraq when he answers a question about the portrayal of Iraqis in his book.

I majored in anthropology so I thought I was kind of going to be immune from the feelings that you’re 8,000 miles away and you’re just mad. You don’t want to be there and you’re pissed, and, unfortunately, it just manifests itself more often in anger at the people you’re supposed to be helping, the people that are right in front of you.

I knew that it was wrong to be so angry, but I really wanted to show the feelings that you have there. Obviously all Iraqis aren’t terrible people. I ust wanted to show the insanity that you start to feel. When soldiers go over there, some literally didn’t get feelings of anger and could still get along with the locals, but those were the minority. You have to blame someone for being over there, and you blame the locals, whether it’s right or wrong.

There were moments of levity. You get really bad gallows humor - I’ve heard that when they do the crime scene detective films they show in court they have to take the sound out because the cops are making uncomfortable jokes. It’s the same sort of thing - you’re in this uncomfortable situation and you end up making jokes. Like when my friend Creed said to me about the guy who had his head taken off by the .50-cal: "What do you think the last thing that went through his head was?" and we couldn’t stop laughing about that.

It kind of shows the human side - American tend to think their soldiers are somehow perfect, and I think that does them a disservice, because when you have someone who’s perfect and something bad happens, all of the sudden you have to blame them. You’re not giving credit to the emotional spectrum that’s taking them on this ride every day. I think that’s the huge point of my book. All those jokes were just to show that we were human beings in this extraordinary situation, and that’s how we reacted. Of course everybody laughs. People laugh at ridiculous times.  

Listen to Crawford on NPR.

(The painting above is George Grosz, "The Convict": Monteur John Heartfield after Franz Jung’s Attempt to Get Him Up on His Feet, 1920.)