2006: Fall/Winter Chasing Ghosts

By Paul Rieckhoff ’98. New York: New American Library, 2006. 336 pp. $24.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Ben Lieber

Paul Rieckhoff ’98 begins Chasing Ghosts, his memoir of his service as an infantry lieutenant in the Iraq War, with an epigraph from the Vietnam novelist Tim O’Brien: “If you don’t like obscenity, you don’t like the truth…. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.” It’s an appropriate start to a book that confronts the horrors of the Iraq War—and, by extension, all wars—in vivid, colloquial prose laced with a profanity he surely didn’t learn during his years at the Fairest College.
A former student-body president and football player at Amherst, Rieckhoff could easily have parlayed his education and experience into a successful career on Wall Street, as indeed he had begun to do in the years following his graduation. But like his grandfather and his father before him, he also felt the pull of national service, and joined the Army Reserves straight out of college. By the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he had quit his Wall Street job and transferred to the National Guard. His motives were personal (“I…wanted to do the hardest thing I could do. I needed a trying experience that would test my mettle”), but they were also principled: “In a democracy, the military should be representative of the population. Just because I didn’t have to go didn’t mean I shouldn’t go.”

Those principles underpin the prose of Chasing Ghosts—both the profanity and, more important, the scorn and outrage that motivate it. Initially a skeptic about our reasons for going to war, he nonetheless refused to let himself off the hook because of those doubts. Nor does he let his superiors, in the Army and in the national government, off the hook either. He defends the enlisted men under his command as passionately in the book as he did in Iraq, and he reserves his contempt for the bunglers he believes jeopardized his men’s lives by trying to fight the war on the cheap. This passion places him squarely in a long line of American war novelists and journalists—Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Tim O’Brien, Robert Stone, Michael Herr. Lofty company, to be sure, but not undeserved, given the depth of Rieckoff’s outrage.

Of all previous wars, it’s the shadow of Vietnam that falls most heavily over Chasing Ghosts. The ghosts of the title are in fact the enemy insurgents, who melt away each time Rieckhoff and his men attempt to strike at them directly. But they are also the ghosts of Vietnam, which continue to influence the ways in which proponents of the Iraq War decide to conduct it and opponents to protest it: “America was still suffering from a Vietnam hangover,” Rieckhoff writes. “The country viewed everything through Vietnam goggles, and that needed to change.” The metaphors may be mixed—the eyewear in question must have been beer goggles, which Rieckhoff could only have encountered during his time at Amherst—but the perception is acute.

As a member of the Vietnam generation myself, and one who didn’t even come close to military service (I graduated from college in 1972, with a high draft lottery number), I can’t help viewing the current war through my opposition to the previous one. Rieckhoff is particularly good at disentangling the present from the past and explaining, from the point of view of the forces on the ground, the differences between them. His stance is deliberately non-partisan—he proudly proclaims himself an independent in terms of party affiliation—except insofar as he owes his greatest loyalty to the enlisted men whom he describes as consistently under-supported both by the public and by their superiors, up to and including the Commander-in-Chief. It’s a delicate balancing act, but Rieckhoff pulls it off, and his success in doing so makes his criticism of the conduct of the war all the more pointed.

The elusiveness of the enemy not only frustrates Rieckhoff and his men as they search for insurgents in the streets of Baghdad; it also blunts the narrative drive of the book, whose shape is, if anything, the opposite of a conventional war story. There is no Normandy invasion or Battle of the Bulge, or even Khe Sanh or Danang. The one moment of triumph—I use the word advisedly—comes near the very beginning of the war, when President Bush declares “Mission Accomplished,” a statement for which Rieckhoff reserves his deepest scorn. What follows for Rieckhoff and his men is only consistent low-level fear and frustration, punctuated by brief bursts of action (house-to-house searches, IED explosions) whose intensity he conveys with vivid immediacy. The climax, ironically enough, arrives after he and his men return to the United States, and the inadequacy of the military’s support mechanisms for its most recent veterans is brought home to him. His reaction, fueled by the same righteous anger that carried him through his time in Iraq, is to step forward as a spokesperson for his fellow veterans, and to urge both candidates in the 2004 presidential election to place the needs of the veterans near the top of their campaign agendas. The failure of his efforts in this regard—detailed with bipartisan contumely for both Bush and Kerry—leads him ultimately to found the first organization for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, of which he is now executive director.

Near the beginning of the book, Rieckhoff and his men find themselves stationed in Kuwait, cooling their heels as they wait for the invasion to start. Ever the Amherst alum, he views this interregnum as an educational opportunity: “I often tried to introduce the Platoon to something other than Maxim. I passed them authors like Gore Vidal, Joseph Conrad, John Fowles and Thomas Friedman.” By the end of the book, Rieckhoff is back on campus, delivering the first of many speeches on the conduct of the war and the treatment of the vets. In between lies a compelling narrative told with a passion that illuminates not only the land on which he so bravely fought but also the troubled state in which our country finds itself, two years after he and his men returned from Iraq.

Lieber is dean of students at Amherst.