The Education of Corporal John Musgrave: Vietnam and Its Aftermath by John Musgrave
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Like many others, I was smitten with John Musgrave as he told his story in Ken Burns’s Vietnam War series. Articulate, emotional, intelligent, thoughtful, his appearance on the screen always made us sit up and pay attention. So I was eager to read this full-blown memoir.
A tall skinny kid, Musgrave never wanted to be anything but a Marine. Gung ho from childhood, from a family with long military experience, this is where he belonged. And he is here to tell you now what learning to be a Marine is like. It’s torturous, violent abuse. The boys (and they are boys – Musgrave turned 19 in the jungles of Vietnam) are torn down in every possible way, and then built back up into Marines, imbued with an inviolable code of behavior and obedience. Once he has survived (and thrived), all he wants to do is go to Vietnam. Once there, he’s angry when they assign him to MP duty – he’s infantry! he’s a rifleman! He wants out there in the jungle, where the action is. Once he’s sent out there, he wants to walk point, the most dangerous, death-inviting role there is. And he looks back at the horrific training camp and is grateful, because it taught him exactly what he needed that kept him alive.
Barely. Hideously wounded by machine gun fire into his chest, Musgrave is invalided out and, contrary to everyone’s expectations, survives. And then comes the aftermath of healing, readjustment, and a dire struggle for another kind of survival. Drinking heavily, isolated, suicidal, brooding over what he has experienced, he finds a connection with the Vietnam Vets Against the War organization. While maintaining his abiding love for his incredibly courageous and supportive Marine buddies and the Marines in general, he comes to see that their bravery and dedication was in service of… nothing. Millions of deaths in the name of a lost, noxious cause, a government sending him and his colleagues to die horribly while having to scrounge in the pile of equipment taken off dead soldiers for boots, unrotted clothing, and sufficient ammunition for rifles that jam every time you pulled the trigger. And it is this recognition that leads him to join the long line of veterans who lined up in Washington DC and threw away their medals.
Since then, Musgrave has been prominent in veterans’ organizations, in a leadership role with VVAW and the POW movement. While working in a bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, he created a collection of military and war literature that became a gathering place for vets to meet and talk. He reads, he writes poetry, he runs reading groups at Fort Riley. He looks for other vets – regardless of which war they have fought in – and connects them, serves them, provides opportunities for talk, for aid. It is a powerful and absorbing story of one man’s experience in the military, in war, after war, and forging a new path to thinking and living.
That said, Musgrave considers himself a poet, not a novelist or memoirist. This book was written with the assistance of Bryan Doerries, who assembled transcripts of interviews and memories from John into this book. While the salty and often profane language is left in, and the incidents described are often harrowing, the finished product is smooth, detailed, and polished. The memories seem flawlessly presented, details all present and correct, the narrative streams like silk. And I found myself wondering how Musgrave could recall the infinite detail of decades ago, however vivid, in such perfect entirety. Did he keep a journal? Obviously, events burned deep into his consciousness, and some things you just don’t forget. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was an expertly packaged portrait, and that the man who trembled and stuttered before the camera as he recalled the night he nearly blew his head off until his dogs scratched at the door, is somewhere beneath this surface of this important and affecting book.
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