Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine.

© 2008 Tyler E. Boudreau.
Feral House, Port Townsend, WA. 98368
ISBN: 978-1-932595

I don’t know another book, on any subject, let alone on war, let alone on Iraq or the Corps, that combines such breathtaking candor and self-awareness with such impressive insight and extremely good writing, as well. Riveting, engrossing, simply terrific, a page-turner.
Daniel Ellsberg

Oohrah! ^{OohRah! is “the Marine Corps’ modified version of the Turkish word for “Kill.” [80]}

What you won’t find in this book – well not a lot of at any rate – are the “in the blood of it” battle scenes typical of most war stories. Despite the cover art, Packing Inferno is no chronological account of the gritty guts of war – there’s no recounting of the hand-to-hand firepower in Fallujah.

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of horrific stories to give the most craven of kill-junkies their fix, but it’s not that kind of book, even though the writer is a self-avowed blood-lusting former marine who, after ten years of training for the kill, was eager to get into the Iraq war zone to “gouge out a set of eyeballs.”

How long can you pretend to gouge eyeballs before you can’t wait to do it for real – to see the thing dangling from its socket? How many times can you run the rounded edge of a bayonet across a man’s throat before you crave the sound of a desperate gasp that comes only from the other side of that blade? [6]

And true too, once there, after immersion, Boudreau isn’t hesitant to relay back to us the honest truth: “After that first firefight in Lutifiyah, I began to crave the elation of the kill.” [55]

But how he harnesses our attention, oddly enough, is by associative forays into politics, memory, military history and confession, moving us from contemplating the appeal the Marine Corps has for abused kids from broken homes, to detailed anecdotes of boot camp, and through the waysides of ‘safe’ duty in the Combat Operations Center (COC) in Iraq, frustratingly far from the dust, smoke, flies and firefights of action, though not from the terror, elation and adrenal highs.

Sounds like I can’t make up my mind doesn’t it? Sounds I don’t know what I wanted, or who I was or whether I cherished the killer in me or despised him. [98]

His ruminations take us down pitted Iraqi roads in up-armored humvees, and along side memories of patrols, some quiet, some not so, ultimately ending in meditations on injuries, combat stress and where a marine’s loyalty remains in the face of deteriorating mission and morale. What emerges is a fully-fleshed view of how our modern Marine Corps got to its current state as a crack production unit – production not of military expertise, but of tortured souls, drawn and quartered between totally incompatible goals in Iraq --- democratic liberation and imperialistic occupation.

We learn, for instance, of General Mattis’s strategy for success – designed to win “hearts and minds”:

He called it ‘Wave Tactics.’ He said, ‘Marines, every time you pass an Iraqi, I want you to wave at them.’ … This was going to demonstrate our good will, and then the Iraqi people would know – they could see with their own eyes – that we’d truly come as liberators, not occupiers. [32]

But then, as Boudreau recounts:

Maybe they’re not so bad, these Iraqis, I thought. Maybe we can learn to be friends. So I kept right on waving. But then a funny thing happened. As we were driving North toward Baghdad, there were convoys heading south toward Kuwait. They were filled with Soldiers who were going home. They’d already done their stretch in Iraq. And I noticed something. I noticed that in all those convoys, and of all those Soldiers, not one of them was waving. [35]

Combat Stress

In “Four: The Felled Bridge,” Boudreau neatly captures the move from bold perspective of strategic objectives in Iraq to why the American forces were doomed to fail the mission of liberation. In only 2000 words, it shows how one IED explosion changed the focus instantaneously from Wave Tactics to defending and securing American supply routes and territory. 2000 words illustrate conclusively how we went from liberating Iraqis to blowing them to smithereens.

Thus, Boudreau’s ruminating neatly links how our soldiers and military have been thrust into a quagmire, with no sane way out. And so they succumb to that age old war phenomenon, known to various generations by different designations, soldiers’ heart, shell shock, and most recently Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Further, Boudreau argues forcefully that the psychological injury born in trauma is not a “disorder,” but rather an injury. To call it a “disorder” reduces it to some sort of psychological weakness, stigmatizing the veteran who received the life-threatening wound. Life-threatening is no hyperbole; as Boudreau points out, this country faces an epidemic of veteran suicides. Others have demonstrated that the veterans’ violent actions – murder, rape, and hostile outbreaks -- have a tremendous impact on our communities, our police, our churches, families and homes.^{Ilona Meagher, Penny Coleman, Robert Roerich, MD, Johnathan Shay, MD, PhD, D.E. Ford, MSW have all touched on the community impact in their individual work on PTSD.}

Boudreau writes of attending conferences stateside, studying the literature of combat stress, and recognizing that, as other mental health professionals have documented, soldiers can cope with their mental wounds if they believe their war to be just – a fight to liberate a people for example, but they cannot when the war is not just, when it is a war of acquisition, say, for oil. Yet, issues of the morality and ethics of the Iraq invasion are the very questions that mental health professionals tend to duck. [209]

“You have no idea all the shit we didn’t report.” [177]

In fact, everyone ducked the responsibility to tell it straight. The very “history” of the invasion has been rifted. In reviewing the data, even the Iraq Study Group discovered severe under-reporting:

On one day in July 2006, there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. [181]

Boudreau doesn’t let himself off the hook on this account either. Just as the imperial presidency has banned photos of the war’s casualties – ghastly photos of dead soldiers as well as civilians (though oddly enough, not the incendiary photos of the charred remains of mercenaries hung from a bridge in Fallujah) -- the low-level commanders and leaders white wash reports to avoid confrontation with their superiors or having to justify themselves.

As an officer who drafted many hundreds of operation reports in combat, I’d say that any report coming out of a war should be considered immediately suspect, based on politics, based on ambition, based on passion or depravity, or unawareness, or fatigue. [177]

Ultimately, Boudreau’s ruminations weave together five years of our nation’s experience of the war in Iraq into a portrait of our nation: Abu Ghraib, the increasing privatization of the military, nearly 120,000 civilian contractors as of this date, the politics of PTSD, the need to find effective treatment for our veterans suffering such severe combat stress, the censoring and self-censoring of news, and the epidemic of veteran suicides.

Though the structure that holds this portrait together is Proustian, the pace is anything but a meander, and neither is Boudreau’s style ponderous. Instead, Packing Inferno is like a well-orchestrated commando raid. Reading it, you are pulled along, never quite sure what the next paragraph will bring, but by the end, you’ve seen the image in the mirror and are haunted by its presence.

Packing Inferno is a thoughtful meditation on the warrior class, combat stress and where real hell lies, which as Boudreau will tell you, isn’t in the war theatre.

The battleground is merely the foyer. The real hell is here and now, in the aftermath, daily, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, confronting the wounds -- physical and psychological --that are the inevitable outcomes of war.

Available for advance purchase on Amazon, the publication date will be on Veterans' Day.

Comment or leave a question for Tyler Boudreau, author of Packing Inferno

About the reviewer

Cho is a member of the ePluribus Media Board of Directors as well as an editor for the ePluribus Media Journal. She is a Columbia School of Journalism Sulzberger Fellow and has written and collaborated on numerous ePluribus Media Journal stories and research.