Growing up in war zones

A journalist and a marine pen a moving joint memoir of life in battle.

By JONATHAN SPYER
US MARINES scour a road looking for improvised explosive devices near Hit, 170 km. west of Baghdad, in December 2005. (photo credit: REUTERS)
US MARINES scour a road looking for improvised explosive devices near Hit, 170 km. west of Baghdad, in December 2005.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
A photojournalist and a former US Marine share firsthand and wildly different experiences of war in Shooting Ghosts, a joint memoir of Finbarr O’Reilly and Thomas J. Brennan, which depicts the friendship, trauma and long road to recovery of two very contrasting individuals.
O’Reilly is a veteran Canadian photojournalist, formerly of the Reuters wire service, who spent the greater part of his career covering the African continent for the agency. Brennan is a former marine infantryman, wounded in Afghanistan, who subsequently developed a career as a journalist.
Shooting Ghosts: A US Marine and a Combat Photographer, and their Journey Back from War is written in an unusual collaborative style, with the two men alternating the writing of chapters. Sometimes they depict the same incident from their different points of view, but for the most part, each man tells his own story, in which the other makes regular appearances.
The narrative begins with the meeting of the two men at the Hunjak outpost, in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010.
O’Reilly is at the outpost, embedded with US forces. Brennan is in command of the position.
In the course of the deployment at OP Kunjak, Brennan and O’Reilly, after an initial wariness toward one another, strike up a friendship. Shooting Ghosts is at root the story of that friendship, how it develops despite the very different backgrounds and milieus of the two men, and how it survives the brain injury Brennan suffers on November 1, 2010, at Kunjak, from an RPG round fired by an Afghan policeman.
The narrative traces the trauma suffered by both men as a result of their experiences on the frontlines of the “9/11 wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Brennan and O’Reilly’s lives progress along comparable, if not quite parallel lines, in the subsequent years.
Brennan finds the military bureaucracy unresponsive to his needs – in particular, he finds himself the subject of both the indifference of the system and the scorn of his fellows for his attempt to seek help for the psychological effects of the trauma he suffered.
O’Reilly, meanwhile, also grows increasingly disillusioned with the role of the war photographer, questioning both his own motivation for engaging in the profession and the objective value of his bearing witness.
The book contains a handy contrast and differentiation between the role played by the fighter and the reporter in a war context. “He’s a Marine,” writes O’Reilly, “bound by his oath, and honor, and the rule of law, to take orders and follow a chain of command... I’m a photographer – bound by my own codes and contracts, sure, but ultimately free to come and go as I please.”
As one who has spent time on the front line as both a soldier and a correspondent, I find this differentiation especially perceptive.
It is reflected also in the differing tones of the accounts of these two men.
Brennan spends less time ruminating on the nature of war in an abstract sense.
His sections are more concerned with the practical nature of combat and soldiering itself, and later in the harrowing details of his descent into trauma-induced instability, his suicide attempt and his subsequent road back to sanity and success.
Brennan, who became a professional journalist following his retirement from the Marine Corps, has made issues relating to returning servicemen the particular focus of his writing.
O’Reilly, meanwhile, has exited the profession of war photography by the conclusion of the narrative. More crucially, both men have by the book’s end found their way back from the psychological precipices to which their experiences had brought them.
Shooting Ghosts is a worthy addition to the literature on the 9/11 wars. It portrays the human toll paid by the relatively small cohort of young Westerners who fought or reported on those wars from the front.
There is much harrowing insight in this book. Brennan’s depiction of the combat soldier’s overriding fear of the “big f**kup” on the front line is certainly real.
As Brennan accurately describes this, it is not an entirely altruistic impulse. It is the dread of an act of such magnitude that there will be no psychological return from it for the soldier.
The book is not without its limitations.
While it is concerned with the 9/11 wars, there is no serious political analysis of what produced these wars. This might be fine if political matters were avoided entirely, but instead there is a clear assumption that the wars were an unjustified and avoidable waste of time.
We are then presented with an examination of the attraction of young men to combat for its own sake: “The myth of war made it seem noble and defining,” O’Reilly writes. “Something worth dying for.”
O’Reilly appears to have emerged from this often fatal attraction by the book’s end, progressing to a general disillusionment with his former fascination. Brennan, whose approach throughout seems more real and grounded, has also moved on to a mature devotion to his comrades in the USMC and a desire to assist them through his writing.
The depiction of these transitions is full of worthy insight. But the genre of memoir by westerners who have experienced war and found it horrifying, but whose concerns remain strictly limited to the individual experience – with nothing to say concerning war as a tool of policy – strikes me as one marred by an adolescent quality.
Shooting Ghosts, for all its many worthy passages and the sympathetic nature of its narrators, does not entirely escape this limitation.