James's Reviews > Fives and Twenty-Fives

Superb novel of the Iraq war. I read a lot of combat memoirs and novels. I think it's because, despite knowing better intellectually, there is a little-boy part of me who feels that, never having served in the military, I've missed some essential rite of passage. While it goes against every belief I hold that I'm willing to admit to publicly, there is an atavistic part of me convinced that the essence of real manhood is enduring extreme physical discomfort while killing other men. Reading The Things They Carried or The Naked and the Dead gives me gratitude about the ease of a life I'm inclined, unjustifiably, to complain about, but it also lets me fantasize about an ideal me who transcends the physical and moral limitations of my safe, circumscribed peacetime self. My inner Sgt. Croft, like the character in the book and most decidedly unlike me, is hard as nails and without fear. He's the baddest motherfucker in the Valley, as the flak jackets used to say, and that makes him a man.
I think what I loved most about this book was the way it recognized all my combat novel expectations and then proceeded to subvert them. Fives and Twenty-fives depicts warfare that has changed utterly in the intervening half-century since the publication of The Naked and the Dead, while remaining exactly the same. The Marines in Pitre's novel aren't sweltering in muddy, noisome foxholes or boasting about 'greasing Nips.' They sleep in air conditioned hootches and they're subject to sanctions for culturally insensitive behavior. Their road-repair work filling in booby-trapped bomb craters is difficult, dangerous, and agonizingly stressful, but there is no scope for gung ho combat heroics. They are led, like Mailer's grunts, by an omnicompetent badass with 'motivation to spare' and a 'voice [that] could break bones.' This consummate warrior, though is no paragon of manliness. Sgt. Michelle Gomez, we are told, has "[s]hiny black hair smooth as a feather," and she's the baddest protective mother hen in the Valley. Perhaps the biggest change is that the infantrymen on Anopopei, despite all the ugly things they say and do over the course of the novel, know that they're the good guys. The Anbar Marines can take no such satisfaction.
All of this made Fives and Twenty-fives more 'relatable,' as the kids say. Reading classic combat narratives is, for me, in some ways like reading Homer - it's so removed from my experience that I have a hard time believing it. I know that the horrors of Peleliu and the Ardennes actually happened, but the suffering is SO terrible it all seems unreal and abstracted. Mythical. Heroic. Tragic. Whereas Fives and Twenty-fives felt pathetic. Heartbreaking, but without grandeur. All the devastation without the flags and bugles. In a more conventional book about an earlier war, Gomez, hit by enemy fire, would have died nobly and a little enviably. There's nothing enviable about the helpless vegetable whom we encounter, thanks to modern medicine and Pitre's disciplined rejection of cheap, patriotic sentimentality, at the end of this splendid novel.