In Iraq we had a sergeant who dipped Copenhagen while gunning on his tank and who kept an exact count of how many men he believed he had killed in battle. If I recall correctly, that number was 14, give or take a few. What I remember more vividly was his idea for the tattoo that he wanted to get after returning home: an American eagle clutching a sheaf of arrows. Each arrow would stand for one of the insurgents he had laid low in the streets of Baghdad.
I have no idea what happened to this sergeant. But let’s say that he is still alive and that he got that tattoo. Let’s say he wears it on his shoulder and shows it off at parties. You might respond by thanking him for his service and calling him a hero, or maybe you might feel revolted, or grimace and take pity, which is the reaction I am pretty sure he would hate the most.
Of course, there is also the chance you would doubt his story, which is exactly what we did back in 2005.
None of the guys I was friendly with in Third Platoon believed the sergeant’s body count. We thought it was way too high, and we felt downright angry at his glory-hounding.
Another way to put it would be to say that our communal lie detector was spiking off the charts. Common sense pointed us toward the truth. We had been out there fighting beside him in Sadr City and al-Tamar, so we knew there was no way to tell the difference between a person you had killed and a body that belonged to your buddy.
Most often, there were no bodies to be found at all, just the shells of burned-out cars and the pockmarks from bullets embedded in stucco walls — bullets you had fired nearly blindly, under the influence of a strange and numbing feeling of terror, rage and exhilaration. Under these conditions, few of us really knew whom, if anyone, we had hit.
Knowing that, we concluded that this sergeant’s claim to have an exact tally of his kills in that war — in probably any modern war — constituted an absurdly vainglorious proposition. So we treated him just as you would any blowhard, by ignoring him, and if that didn’t work, by poking fun.
We turned a thing he was proud of into a thing he should have been ashamed of, and I am not even talking about the killing itself, but about his claim to know what he could not have known, his exaggeration of his own small role in a conflict that was so much larger and more complicated than any one of us.
My memory of the sergeant and his eagle tattoo resurfaced by way of “Carnivore,” a recently released book on the Iraq war. The book is about (and co-authored by) Dillard Johnson, a retired Army sergeant first class who commanded a Bradley fighting vehicle during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In its marketing material, the publisher, William Morrow, says that the former sergeant is responsible for killing 2,746 enemy combatants in Iraq.
The claim has been widely questioned, including by Dan Murphy in The Christian Science Monitor. Once again, common sense rules. If Mr. Johnson actually killed the number of people attributed to him by his publisher, it would make him personally responsible for the deaths of about one in seven enemy combatants the American government reported killed in action during the first four years of the Iraq war.
Sergeant Johnson received the Silver Star, which is no small achievement. And in an interview with Mr. Murphy, he acknowledged that he did not kill 2,746 Iraqis, saying: “Am I one of the deadliest American soldiers of all time? Probably not. Do I think I did a lot of damage with my vehicle and stuff, with me being decisive? Yeah, absolutely.”
Personally, I don’t really care to know the exact number of people Sergeant Johnson killed, and my quarrel is not so much with him but with how his book is being sold. The promotional campaign behind “Carnivore” represents the latest and most extreme iteration of a publishing phenomenon that I call The War on Terror Kill Memoir.
So far, the best-known books in this genre are “American Sniper” and “No Easy Day.” They have sold millions of copies, and their subtitles tell the tales: “The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History”; “The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden.” And now we can add “Carnivore’s” vaguely superlative “A Memoir by One of the Deadliest American Soldiers of All Time.”
The two-part formula is apparent enough. First, the claim to authenticity (autobiography, memoir, firsthand). And second, the assurance that the reader will learn the intimate details of taking human life.
The problem boils down to this question: “Did you ever kill anybody over there?” Every veteran I know has been subjected to the morbid curiosity that lies at the question’s root, which seems only natural, if tasteless, given a civilian population insulated from military service and the human impact of these wars.
Tact notwithstanding, the question is inescapable. Veterans who want to write about their experience in combat must address it somehow. The “kill memoir” certainly does, tackling civilian curiosity head on, with a direct and sensational approach. Rather than complicate the question or subvert it or implicate the American public as a party to what was done in its name, these books simply answer in the most spectacularly affirmative way possible: “Did I kill anybody? Hell, yeah. His name was Osama bin Laden. Maybe you heard of him.”
Understanding the triumph of the kill memoir is not rocket science. But it is remarkable and more interesting that in a marketplace glutted with soldier memoirs — whether of the best-selling kill variety or a much more thoughtful and modest kind — only two literary novels written by soldiers in the war on terror have been released by major imprints. Both of them, “Fobbit” and “The Yellow Birds,” were published in the fall of 2012. Though they are fictional, they read, in my mind, like more accurate depictions of the totality of what happened in Iraq than any of the supposedly factual accounts I have mentioned.
One benefit of war fiction is that it does not succeed or fail based on accurate body counts or who really fired the fatal shot into Bin Laden’s skull. The fiction writer, and not facts, is the ultimate arbiter of truth, using his or her experience, along with interesting fabrications and a number of different tones not readily accessible through a memoir to create something greater and truer than the sum of its parts.
The two novels by Iraq war veterans are good examples of the possibilities afforded by fiction, and specifically its tone, in dealing with difficult subjects. David Abrams’s “Fobbit” presents the Iraq war as something so bleak and mismanaged that it can only be comically skewered. Kevin Powers’s “Yellow Birds” arrives at some of these same conclusions but takes a nearly opposite tack to get there: its tone is somber, poetic and elegiac. Adding to these works, Ben Fountain, while not a soldier himself, published a masterly Iraq war novel in 2012, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.”
No form or genre — film or writing, fiction or not — provides a clearer route to the truth. But paradoxically, for me, hewing closely to facts feels nearly crippling, at least when it comes to writing about my own war experience. I wonder how I could possibly compose an entire book about events that happened eight and nine years ago. I recall only the gist of what was said, the names and faces of my closest friends, some of the things we did over there, some of the better stories and the worst images, and the feelings that different situations and people left with me. All of these things are faded as the memory of a dream, one that I am glad to see go, and one that I refuse to call the truth.
Fiction, on the other hand, is about cultivating that fleeting dream sense. It is truth through fable and story, highly empathetic and moral even when flouting conventional morality. Good fiction eradicates the barrier between self and other, while the kill memoir reinforces the military-civilian divide. Whatever the author of the kill memoir is, he (always he) is certainly a different breed of man from you or me. He offers the spectacle of high body counts and terrorists twitching on the floor as proof that we are winning. Or if not that exactly, then proof we have inflicted serious damage.
Those of us veterans who are writing about these wars can do better than that. And the publishers should, too.
Brian Van Reet is the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction. He served with the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad in 2004-5 and was awarded a Bronze Star with “V” Device. His writing has been read on National Public Radio and published in The New York Times, The Southern Review, “Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War” and elsewhere.