Artists and Activists Both Have a Role. But Not the Same One.

Horrible slaughter in a region of Iraq where violence has spiraled out of control does not make for a good news story, but there were messages the Marine Corps was happy to put out: that unlike our barbaric enemy, who brutally murdered men, women and children, we cared about Iraqi civilians and would work tirelessly to save lives. And so this young combat correspondent asked one of the Navy surgeons, who for long hours had been feverishly working among the mangled and bloody innocents, to give an interview. And because the only quiet place was the room where they had placed and bagged the dead, the cameraman set up near the bodies of all the people they had failed to save.

Undoubtedly, the doctor knew what messages he was supposed to deliver to the camera, and undoubtedly, he believed in them, too — that he had a noble mission to carry out, and that his noble colleagues were dedicated and skilled and humane. Nor was he new to death. He was a surgeon in a shock-trauma platoon in the most violent city in Iraq, all too familiar with amputating limbs, with stitching intestines back together, with treating burns that devoured faces, ears and fingers. That day could not have been the first time he bowed his head as the chaplain whispered prayers over those who died on the table. But before the interview started and the red light of the camera turned on, he took a moment, sat down among the dead and quietly wept. The young Marine cameraman stood there, silent, patient, and waited for the doctor to collect himself so he could tell his story about the good will of the American military, whose invasion had unleashed this chaos.

I cannot personally verify this story, and there are even details, like the presence of corpses all around, that have always struck me as suspect. Possibly an embellishment of the Marine who told me the story, possibly an unconscious embellishment of my own, maybe even true. And yet, even though they might be a fiction, the images remain in my mind, and those images — the weeping doctor, the Iraqi dead and the young Marine who has carefully framed the shot so that none of those dead could be seen — are sharper and more personal for me than some things that I know happened because I actually lived through them.

My job in the military was to relay the kinds of messages the doctor recited once the red light of the camera turned on. Messages I believed in. I loved the Marines around me, admired our medical units and supported the overall mission. I had been part of a surge of troops to Iraq, part of a new strategy designed to get the population on our side, and during my time in Iraq I felt we’d succeeded, with violence dropping in western Iraq and local leaders increasingly working with coalition forces instead of against them. And because I lived in Iraq for 13 months, spending time with military doctors and engineers and logisticians, with the whole complex machinery of American war, when I returned home I returned with what I felt was a license to pontificate. In bars, my 24-year-old self, with only a limited understanding of Iraq and its politics and history, would hold forth about what happened and how things were going and what America should do, not simply in Iraq but in Afghanistan too. And because I had personal experience with war, people listened.

But alongside my talking points were these other memories and stories, stories that didn’t resolve neatly into an argument about war but seemed instead to express more basic human realities. And so after I got home each day from my job of “telling the Marine Corps story,” I would sit at a desk, sometimes still in my cammies, and write fiction. “We shot dogs,” was the first sentence I wrote, riffing not on my own experience but on stories told to me by a guy I went through training with who served in the second battle of Falluja, where he shot dogs after seeing them eating human corpses. Stories that, for reasons I didn’t yet understand, struck me differently after I returned.