REVIEW OF JASON ARMENT’S MUSALAHEEN: A WAR MEMOIR
by Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell
When I began reading Jason Arment’s Musalaheen: A War Memoir (University of Hell Press), I found the voice strangely familiar. I had read one of the chapters, “Two Shallow Graves,” years before in Best American Essays 2017, edited by Leslie Jamison. But the familiar carried a more personal resonance this time.
His voice recalled the stories I heard as a child from my dad who flew hueys in Vietnam. My husband tells stories, too, and I’ve sat by the fire listening to vivid accounts of sorties flown and close calls. I’ve never been to war. I am a civilian from a post-service military family who became a military spouse. War stories are family stories. They deserve a wider audience, however.
Like the stories of my family, Arment’s memoir operates as a kind of collection, with many of the chapters able to stand alone as their own stories. They are episodic, yet the memoir itself is linear and cohesive because of Arment’s gift for writing memorable characters, vivid descriptions, and lively dialogue; these act as connective tissue in the book. That some chapters can stand alone makes Musalaheen a highly teachable book that can be read as a whole or in excerpts by older high school and college students, and it is my hope that war writing like this can enter more classrooms.
Arment’s Musalaheen captures the immediacy of a well told story while reflecting on what the war in Iraq has meant, not only in its great personal costs but also in the collective moral costs for the country that wages it. The memoir follows the familiar three-act trajectory of training, deployment, and coming home, which provides scaffolding for Arment’s brutally honest portrayal of a remembered self. How are his experiences, as narrated in a linear, coming-of-age chronology, shaped by what he didn’t know, and how does what he learns later about the war shape the writing of that remembered self?
“Musalaheen” means gunslinger, a name given to Arment, a Marine machine gunner, by the children he encounters in an Iraqi village early in his deployment. Inspired by witnessing 9/11 as a high school student, Arment joins the Marines, describing his early intentions as “equal parts war tourist, mercenary, and civic duty.” However, from the beginning, Arment is forever asking questions. “What was I doing?” he thinks to himself after striking a child in the street. Even as he admits, “I never answered the questions,” the questions never really go away, and he begins to collect these doubts and reservations to address later in the writing of this memoir. In fact, the questions and his curiosity are part of his salvation. That Arment can navigate both the expectations of a remembered younger self and the knowledge he gains through both experience and reflection is what gives this work its moral heft and its lasting power.
With each chapter, Arment recollects the disparities between expectation and reality in combat and the confusion that follows. Arment writes this disorientation well, portraying a kind of double perspective as he realizes the war he trained for is not the war he finds himself fighting: “I hadn’t yet broken up the war into two parts in my world: the invasion and occupation. To me, it was the same thing.”
Through vivid dialogue, Arment gestures towards issues with violence, self-destruction, and despair: issues that persist and worsen upon coming home. For example, when Arment tells his chow hall table of an eerie stare-off with a particular type of Marine called a “night rat,” his friend Rose asks: “‘Was he one of those fucking loony toons that stumbles off convoys all fucked in the head?’”
As they discuss the encounter, Arment wonders about the long-term effects of lack of sleep, about sitting in the turret “with the jammers blasting radio waves into your skull.”
“‘Fuck, that’s a good point,’ Rose said. ‘Who knows what any of that shit does to us? I bet the Corps hasn’t done any studies because it doesn’t want us to know.”
The dialogue gives Arment an opening to write about veteran suicide, about not yet knowing he was in the highest risk group: “Seeing the war from the outside wasn’t something we could do yet. We could try to step back from it but wouldn’t understand all the implications until much later.”
Writing, then, becomes an act of recovery–not only of repair–but a literal recovery, an urgent testimony against the polish of time on histories of war. Arment observes upon coming home:
“I already feel the real Iraq slipping back into people the same way insurgents ducked down side streets and faded into crowds when they saw us patrolling, all armor-plated and machine gun wielding. In memory, Iraq has transformed into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland–no fear, all spectacle.”
Arment’s memoir is a howl of resistance against that tidy kind of war story. Musalaheen is relentless. While being highly readable due to the author’s skill and engaging voice, it is not an easy read. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
In the final paragraph, Arment admits that he writes for other veterans and toward their healing, but he gives all of us this important book, one I hope will become a classic, read beyond the war in Iraq and the generations that fought it.
Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell lives and writes in Tucson, where she received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Her essays and poems can be found in Arts & Letters, Bat City Review, and The Florida Review, among others.