{"id":16914,"date":"2016-07-01T05:30:31","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T10:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=16914"},"modified":"2016-07-01T05:30:31","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T10:30:31","slug":"military-history-books-worth-a-damn-pumpkinflowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/07\/01\/military-history-books-worth-a-damn-pumpkinflowers\/","title":{"rendered":"Military History Book’s Worth A Damn: Pumpkinflowers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pumpkin\"<\/p>\n

Matti Friedman,\u00a0Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier\u2019s Story<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Algonquin Books, 2016).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Iraq veterans finally have their book; a manuscript that really deals with the whole of the Iraq experience. After over a decade at war in Iraq, we now have the best first-person account, not only of fighting against the insurgency, but also what it felt like to come home after. The book gives the most vivid account of what it is like to return to a society that doesn\u2019t understand or support your war. It also draws some conclusions about what this all means for the larger Middle East.<\/p>\n

But the best book about the Iraq War isn\u2019t actually about the Iraq War. In Pumpkinflowers<\/a><\/em>, Matti Friedman tells the story of a small outpost \u2014 called the Pumpkin, thus the title (\u201cflowers\u201d refers to the code word for wounded soldiers) \u2014 during the unnamed Israeli occupation of Lebanon\u2019s \u201csecurity zone\u201d in the 1990s. The many clear parallels between these two experiences are, quite frankly, haunting. While the two experiences are not identical, they appear plagiarized from each other.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s misleading to call Pumpkinflowers<\/em> first-person, as the book doesn\u2019t slip into personal narration until page 90. The first section is from the perspective of Avi, a soldier who was stationed at the Pumpkin some years before Matti would arrive. The compound literary device works, and provides both a longer historical perspective, and a second viewpoint of the events in Southern Lebanon and the Israeli\u2019s opponents in Lebanese Hezbollah.<\/p>\n

Friedman is \u2014 of course \u2014 hardly oblivious to the parallels with later wars, as he writes with almost two decade\u2019s hindsight and history. In a way, it seems Friedman is haunted not only by his personal experiences in Southern Lebanon, but also the later American experience in Iraq. He sees Israel\u2019s \u201csecurity zone war\u201d as important if only for being the first such fought by post-colonial Arabs against occupiers (whether this is true, or whether his war is in a long tradition traced to colonial events such as Algeria War of Independence and Iraq\u2019s 1920 Revolution can be argued). Within a few years, elements of the security zone war would appear elsewhere \u2014 most notably in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan: \u201cIf my ancestors\u2019 great war was the first of the twentieth century, I believe our little one was the first of the twenty-first.\u201d<\/p>\n

The little things that the Israeli\u2019s experienced in South Lebanon will also have a ring of familiarity to Iraq\u2019s veterans. I had to laugh at the author\u2019s confusion over his commander\u2019s insistence that they have a Passover seder meal:<\/p>\n

\n

It was obvious to us that we would have a seder, that matzah and haroset<\/u> would appear, that soldiers would risk their lives on the country roads to clean the dishes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I similarly thought of the logistical mountains moved in Iraq to bring Thanksgiving dinners to the most remote and lonely outposts.<\/p>\n

The Israelis who fought in the security zone war also returned to a public unable to understand what they had experienced. One would think that Israel\u2019s conscription policies would have alleviated this issue, but that turns out to be less the case. \u201cOnly a fraction of Israeli men serve in combat units, and not all combat units were engaged in Lebanon.\u201d The result was that the discharged, barely-adult Israeli men found that, \u201cback in civilian life the soldiers of the security zone saw no reflection of our experience, no indication that anything important had happened.\u201d I suspect that veterans of the Basra and Mosul streets would have little to add to this sentiment.<\/p>\n

Finally, at a more expansive level, the Israelis learned in the 1990s, as the Americans would in 2003-11, that \u201c[w]e might make good choices, or bad choices, but the results are unpredictable and the possibilities limited. The Middle East doesn\u2019t bend to our dictates or our hopes. It won\u2019t change for us.\u201d As America openly debates how \u2014 or if \u2014 to deal with a post-Arab Spring Middle East, this war-won sentiment is a good, if perhaps incomplete, starting point.<\/p>\n

Matti Friedman has done a great service in helping Americans understand our own unpopular and ambiguous war by giving us the lens of Israel\u2019s unpopular and ambiguous war. That his own purpose doubtless has more to do with his own demons is beside the point. I cannot recommend this work enough to those who want to understand the American experience in Iraq through the experience of another nation. This is true regardless of whether one reads despite having no experience in Iraq, or because one is burdened by it.<\/p>\n

Read the Original Article at War on the Rocks<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matti Friedman,\u00a0Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier\u2019s Story\u00a0(Algonquin Books, 2016). Iraq veterans finally have their book; a manuscript that really deals with the whole of the Iraq experience. After over a decade at war in Iraq, we now have the best first-person account, not only of fighting against the insurgency, but also what it felt like to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[932,1427,4634,5946],"tags":[12594,12595,763,7348,12596,1567],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}