Kayla Williams: Loves her Rifle

I'm a sucker for memoirs, when they are well done.

Kayla Williams has written a really good memoir.

A good memoir is made good by the details. She says something every twenty pages or so that sounds so honest and fresh--she comes home and looks at all the Americans around her and they all look...fat.

She is someone I could likely enjoy in small doses, but those would be worthwhile doses.

I've known women like her, mostly nurses. But what is different about her is her eye for detail and her memory and her ability to make the mundane details of her job, accounting for every single item of Army equipment, knowing what each letter and number on the stock of a rifle or computer means in the Army's coding system.

She describes what it is like to ride behind the driver, on the left hand side of a Humvee, with no door, holding a rifle with a round in its chamber and the safety on, and having to decide whether or not to open fire on a civilian car which is recklessly trying to pass her convoy, and lifting her rifle only to notice an eight year old boy in the back seat, and deciding not to fire but to wave instead.

She also, casually, reveals the lie we all heard from President George W. Bush when he went on TV to insist Abu Ghraib was, "Not who we are." Turns out, Abu Ghraib was exactly who we were, frightened, stupid, sadistic, ignorant, emotional, irrational, the worst sort of thugs.

She thinks beyond the average grunt's thoughts. She did not intervene during an Abu Ghraib style interrogation when her fellow American soldiers burned their captive with cigarettes after stripping him naked and using her to humiliate him.

She documents, as so many have before her, the essential truth that any war of occupation is a lie. The President, whoever he is, the generals talk about a "mission" when there is no mission. The only mission is not to allow the natives to embarrass the President and the generals, and of course, it's a fool's mission.

This is a book worth reading.

I hope Kayla Williams is safe now. She ended the book in 2004 and she notes she can be called back into the Army and back to Afghanistan any time until 2008.

She joined the Army, as did almost all her brothers in arms, for the money.

The volunteer Army has really become, as Bob Dylan once said, "Join the Army if you fail."

Once in the Army, many succeed in getting what they did not get from American schools or factories or "communities." They got a community; they became competent at something.

Of course, they had to kill people to do that.