Baghdad Express

A just-short-of-the-front view of the Gulf War from a fish out of water.

Marine reservist Turnipseed, of the Sixth Motor Transport Battalion, was studying philosophy, in a desultory way, at the University of Minnesota, when the call came for him to report to his reserve unit in the summer of 1990. He was aware of the tacit approval sent to Saddam from the Bush Administration to go ahead with the invasion: "Even though I felt deep within me that this was a stupid war, an avoidable war, I wanted very badly to see the worst of war." He does see some of that; not the front-line-fighting worst, but the kind of dangers that circle an incompetent officer; being given experimental drugs in an effort to forestall the effects of chemical or biological attacks, resulting in confusion, irritability, tremors, rashes, weakness, memory loss, incontinence, and vomiting; the grief endured for his cynical views: "You're a real shitbird who doesn't care about his God, his Country, his Corps—not even his worthless-fucking-self. I ought to kill you myself, you piece of shit," chirps his master gunnery sergeant. To keep his footing as well as his perspective, he falls back on Thoreau and Emerson, the preSocratics, and the Duino Elegies. Yet he also sharply captures what it was like to drive his rig from the depot to the front, full of ammunition—"They called us the 'Baghdad Express,' making our way up the Abu Hadriyah Highway from Jubayl to Mishab"—with local assistants he didn't share a language with and who might bolt, and in the process describing the transformation of landscape that war brings in its wake as he ferries back POWs. He serves as a useful creature of amusement for his comrades (the oddball who can be counted on to make mistakes) and as a flippant foil to overpreening officers and NCOs, but also as a guy who can pull his weight.

For all his philosophical bent, Turnipseed primarily works the surface of events, which is where we want to be to gather the immediacy, the chaos and insanity of it all.