M. C. Armstrong

I could never quite warm up to M.C. Armstrong's memoir, THE MYSTERIES OF HADITHA, which seemed to be just all over the place. With an infamous place like HADITHA in the title, I was expecting an Iraq war story, but soon saw it was nothing of the sort. Instead I got the scattered adventures of a not quite grown-up thirty-ish guy (still single) who was, by his own admission, the joker, the prankster, the family fool, still trying to win the approval of his father, a medical doctor of infectious diseases, and/or measure up to his brother, an oncologist. An "interdisciplinary" teacher of English at NC A&T, an HBCU in Greensboro, Armstrong aspires to be a writer, and, again, wanting to impress his father, he manages to wangle his way into an "imbed" as a journalist with a Special Ops SEAL team led by his high school pal, 'Diet.' (And yeah, at first I thought it was pronounced DEET, as in the German name Dietrich, but no, it's DY-ET, as in the lose weight word. And the author's own HS nickname is 'Eat Boy.') Since he has no journalistic experience or credentials, Armstrong and a colleague invent a non-existent "literary journal" to give him legitimacy. In fact, even a small-town newspaper declined to sponsor his trip to Iraq. So he goes deep into credit card debt to pay for it himself - the plane fare, the equipment (helmet, body armor), etc. And the story jumps back and forth chronologically, from his high school hijinks to the present, telling of his just-broken engagement to a long-time girlfriend, a former stripper, and his dying grandfather in Florida, and his mother, a cancer survivor then in remission.

But he does get to Iraq, where his friend's unit is stationed near the Haditha dam and its not-yet infamous burn pits. He accompanies his friend "outside the wire" on patrol, searching for WMD. And, stepping out of the Humvee, he declaims -

"And it felt good. I felt like I'd finally defeated my father ... feel the awe of the rube snorting his cocaine of war sand, his nitrous of war wind ... huffing the gas of Iraq, playing soldier with the SEALs. I have never in my life felt more like a man."

But it doesn't last, and he quickly becomes bored, reverting to a grumpy little boy -

" We got out of the Humvee and we got back in the Humvee. Over and over. And it was starting to get hot, hard to sit up straight with the weight of my body armor."

In all, Armstrong's imbed in Iraq is little more than a week, and in that short time he finds his and Diet's attitudes about the war are vastly different, although Diet admits he is mostly just "cleaning up the mess."

During his trip he learns, accidentally, that one of the masterminds of 9/11, still a prisoner at Gitmo, was in fact an alum of NC A&T. And, in another chance conversation with a civilian contractor, he learns of a possible massive weapons cache inside the Haditha dam. He researches and follows up on both these leads, and, in the last forty pages or so, sounds almost like a real investigative journalist, and also deals, in a much more serious tone, with his mother's death.

Armstrong is a capable enough writer, but it seemed he couldn't quite decide when to be funny and when to be serious. Was he writing a memoir or an expose of government cover ups and wrongdoing? What he ended up with was a mish-mash of the two with numerous side trips and flashbacks. If he was seeking a side entrance into the specialized genre of modern war lit, he did not, to my mind, quite find it. Recommended, but with the aforementioned reservations.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (altro)