“Excerpt:
When I deployed for the first time [my wife] asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do.
“How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?” my wife asked.
“He won’t come home,” her grandmother answered. “The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you.”
The story of Brian Castner’s Crazy is trim, sad, and a must-read.
What makes this book so different from the other books about the Iraq war?
1. There are no real politics. You can certainly superimpose your own politics on it if you want, as is the case with goddamn EVERYTHING, but the book itself goes a different way. It’s highly personal, focusing on the side of things that you don’t see so much. The writer talks about what he knows and what he experienced, and he leaves the rest alone.
2. He does a good job making you understand his Crazy. A lot of books about people who are crazy try to make you experience crazy for yourself, see the world as they see it. So they use weird line breaks, broken sentences, bizarre wordplay and other tricks to try and take you somewhere you can’t go because, well, you’re not crazy. What Castner does is explain what he is thinking about when he’s feeling crazy. How it changes him.
3. This is not, like so many other books about people with problems, about redemption. Yes, there is a brief moment when he seems to overcome his crazy, just for a second. But it comes back, of course. And the odds against him are insurmountable. After he describes panicking in an airport and mentally planning who to shoot first and where to go in order to escape, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll ever be all the way better. After he explains just a touch of the physics behind explosions and why they can destroy a brain without destroying the body around it, it’s hard to think that he’s ever going to be the way he was before. After he says that his wife wants him to cheat on her just so that she could leave him, you kind of give up on the idea of him having a normal life.
So, in a genre that involves a lot of dates, tactical information, and insider knowledge, someone has written a book that is deeply personal and brave in revealing that something inside someone who made a career out of being tough and mentally calm, that something inside that person has been fundamentally and irrevocably broken. More than that, it does a great job of connecting the past with the present and making a reader understand the problem: there’s really IS no difference.
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