Jerad W. Alexander

When our son was a boy, he suddenly dropped his obsession’s over dinosaurs, which had followed his interest in trucks, for a new interest. He had watched The Audie Murphy Story and became obsessed with war. He read books on tanks, ships, planes, and war machines of all kinds. Then, he saw The Longest Day, then read the book by Cornelius Ryan on which the film was based. He read about WWII and later 20th c wars and as a teenager became as much an expert on them as he had been on dinosaurs or trucks.

One day at school a boy accused him of liking war. No, he responded, I hate war; I am interested in it. And I was quite grateful that we had talked with him about what he was reading and seeing as Desert Storm played out on the television. That he did not idealize war as heroism and cool.

Jerad W. Alexander was obsessed with war as a child growing up on Air Force bases, surrounded by jet planes flying overhead and men with cool uniforms and weapons and war stories. His boyhood games were war based. He joined the Civil Air Patrol, a civilian auxiliary arm of the air force created in the late 1930s.

Alexander dreamed of one thing in life: to serve in the infantry. To see active duty. He joined the Marines after high school. He went through training and was assigned noncombat duty. When he finally got to a war zone, it changed everything. And after he was discharged, he floundered, his girlfriend broke up with him, and it took Alexander years to process what he had experienced.

The result is this memoir.

No one in my family has served in the military since my great-great-great grandfather was drafted into the Confederate militia and my great-great-grandfather fled Russia to escape service in the czar’s army. Things are different now with an all-volunteer army. Today, young people are not forced to serve, they chose to serve. They are volunteers.

Alexander describes his mother’s role as a military wife. She and his father were in the Air Force, but she left the military when she became a mother. “The military spouse lives in a perpetual state of aggressive compromise beyond the basic demands of marriage,” he writes; “The military is a third partner in the house, a jealous one, and its whims trump the needs and desires of anyone tethered to it.”

Alexander writes about his disillusionment and doubt about the purpose of his time in the Marines. What was accomplished? Inside, you see the cracks and flaws in the system.

Alexander excels at describing his infatuation and idealization, the experience of war, the confliction over killing. Interjected into the backstory are memories of combat.

Disillusionment. Few of us escape it. Our childhood imaginings of grown up life rarely meet expectations, our idealism crashes into the windshield of reality, leaving us confused or broken or disoriented. Alexander’s memoir is an important contribution.

I received a free book from Algonquin. My review is fair an unbiased.… (más)

We would do well to always bear in mind that there is the Romance of war (the spangled stars, the erotic thump of mortar shells, the foxhole brotherhood) and then there is the Reality of war (bodies turned inside out by those same mortars, the selfish small-minded decisions of politicians, the Long Suck of military duty). In his new memoir VOLUNTEERS, Jerad W. Alexander so perfectly, and so beautifully, describes a life raised under the red-white-and-blue banner of military pride where enlisting in the armed services was practically a given, an inevitable tradition of service. As a young boy living next to an Air Force base, he was raised on the intoxicating perfume of jet fuel and the sweat of hard work in the military families he saw all around him. He knew someday he would be a full-fledged Combat Soldier. But what happens when the starry-eyed kid meets the reality of the Forever Wars of Iraq and Afghanistan? Jerad Alexander takes us on an illuminating trip through an American life struggling to find the balance between peace and war. As he writes, shortly after shooting at a man on an Iraqi street, "it all felt remarkably useless and wasteful and hollow."

If you've been snacking on nothing but Patriotism most of your life, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It will open your eyes and your mind.… (más)