Here's the thing about war: Jerry Bruckheimer and Tom Clancy peacetime fantasies notwithstanding, military force turns out to be quite a blunt instrument. There are few “surgical strikes,” smart weapons prove mutton-headed, and slam-dunk intelligence mistakes plain aluminum tubing for uranium-enriching centrifuge parts. The fog of war as bloody miasma: No one knows who is shooting at whom, wedding parties and bomb-making teams are conflated, little girls on bicycles look like vehicle-borne IEDs.
Here's the thing about soldiers: To prosper, to survive, just to maintain their sanity, they must discern certainty within that chaos, even if it must be manufactured. Perceived ambiguities only prolong response times and that delay, to the soldier, may be lethal. Surgeons have a saying: “wrong, sometimes – hesitant, never.” It applies equally to war fighters. Thus, the nation's war fighters in Afghanistan have been seeing unmistakable progress for eight years now; the Taliban are in evident disarray, the strategy is working.
FOB DOC: A Doctor on the Front Lines in Afghanistan: A War Diary, by Ray Wiss, Douglas & McIntyre, 194 pages, $32.95
War novels and screenplays proceed from this central and organizing tension. But to write insightfully about war, the writer needs to be able to apprehend both realities simultaneously. This is why it takes a decade after a war for the good ones to appear, for that transition to occur in the author's mind. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried was published in 1990, fully 15 years after the helicopters pulled away from the roof in Saigon; Jarhead appeared just as Iraq was being invaded, for the second time, 13 years later.
FOB DOC is lodged entirely in the unambiguous present: This non-fiction account by Captain Ray Wiss, a one-time infantry officer, now an emergency medicine physician from Sudbury, recounts his six months in Afghanistan from December, 2006, to May, 2007. The book was vetted by the Canadian Forces public affairs branch prior to publication, and the foreword is by General Rick Hillier. It describes graphically the eviscerations and dismemberments of Afghans and coalition soldiers alike, with full-colour photographs of shattered Afghan children staring hollow-eyed, and of intestines spilling from Afghan abdomens.
Wiss describes himself as happy to see the remains of dead Taliban and he knows that “as long as we are here, the Taliban cannot win, and the Afghan government cannot lose.” He keeps two rounds, a 9-mm for his pistol and a 5.56-mm for his rifle, in his pocket, in case he is threatened with capture by the Taliban and needs to dispatch himself. Helpfully, we are provided with a photograph of these too. He enjoys serving as sentry in an LAV out on patrol. He fairly itches for action.
Wiss is a valuable lens through which to examine both the war and the self-certainty that has propelled it
Clearly, however, he is a skilled physician, and fortunately he engages mostly with a scalpel and a suture driver. His resolve and his courage animate him, and his book's importance transcends its bravado-laden aspects, especially in providing such a sobering picture of the carnage there, so far away from all of us.
Although it would be easy to reduce the book to a caricature of jingoistic self-certainty, as with real people and real situations generally, things here are more complex. Weiss has socialist sympathies, he tells us; he is troubled by the Iraq war, and he saw the insurgency in Nicaragua first-hand. Certainly, he is deeply stirred by the plight of the Afghan people. Only the paranoid can impugn the motives of people like Capt. Wiss; all the soldiers one meets there, pretty much, want to help the Afghans.
