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A review by liralen
Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq by Michael Anthony
2.0
For whatever reason, I have an interest in military-medical memoirs—I'm not sure why, except perhaps that you get a different view from them than you do from more general military memoirs. This had some major proofreading problems (it gets a partial pass for that because the copy I read was an ARC, picked up at a secondhand shop; the pass is only partial because, in my experience, when such problems are that extensive pre-proofing, a lot of problems remain post-proofing), and the writing was...not great, as you might expect from a non-trained writer.
But setting that aside, this feels like a tremendously important viewpoint. Of all the medical memoirs I've read that have taken place in war zones, this is the only one written by somebody who was both a) in the army and b) not highly trained outside the army. That is, he wasn't a doctor, wasn't a surgeon, wasn't a nurse volunteering with MSF; he enlisted and was trained by the army as a medic, which is a very different viewpoint. Take [b:Rule Number Two|1915341|Rule Number Two Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital|Heidi Squier Kraft|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344265875s/1915341.jpg|1917367]: as an psychologist in the army, Kraft was an officer and subject to less...scrutiny? Indignity? And, in any case, when she decided that she wanted to continue to work with the army but no longer be up for deployment (i.e., work only stateside), that was a choice she could make. It's not something an average enlisted soldier can decide.
All of my [five] brothers and one sister [of two] ended up joining the Military, but different branches... So, when I turned seventeen the question never seemed to be if I would join the military or go to college. It was only, which branch of the military will it be? (61)
So he brings to this a different perspective than you might get otherwise, and a certain bluntness:
When I first thought about joining the military I took [a vocational aptitude test]. I got a great score and the Army told me I could have practically any job I wanted. I told the recruiter that I'd take whichever job had the highest bonus and the biggest kicker for school. He said an OR medic gets an eight thousand dollar bonus and a monthly GI bill kicker (for college) of three hundred and fifty dollars a month. He did explain what an OR medic actually does, but at the age of seventeen I was too busy daydreaming all of the magical things I could do with eight thousand dollars. (15)
Working on the Iraqi relaxes me a little bit. I know I'm doing my best to try to save him, but I also know that, truthfully, if he dies it won't be as big a deal as if an American dies. If that happened on my table everyone would read about it back in the States and his name would be in a wall, forever engraving my inability not [sic] to save his life. But if an Iraq [sic] dies, I know that most likely he will be given a paupers [sic] funeral and back in the States his name won't appear except as a statistic. (31)
I don't mean to suggest that Anthony's depiction of the situation is without any complexity—among other things, he is quick to note both that both Americans and Iraqis suffer from war in Iraq—but rather that he's coming at it from a different angle than, say, [b:Chris Coppola|6952515|Coppola A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq|Chris Coppola|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328774894s/6952515.jpg|7187231]. Did my fingers itch with desire to fix the damn proofreading already? Yes.* Did I sometimes sigh over the amount of judgement? Yes. But there's still something to be learned here.
*Or possibly they itched from eczema. Take your pick.
But setting that aside, this feels like a tremendously important viewpoint. Of all the medical memoirs I've read that have taken place in war zones, this is the only one written by somebody who was both a) in the army and b) not highly trained outside the army. That is, he wasn't a doctor, wasn't a surgeon, wasn't a nurse volunteering with MSF; he enlisted and was trained by the army as a medic, which is a very different viewpoint. Take [b:Rule Number Two|1915341|Rule Number Two Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital|Heidi Squier Kraft|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344265875s/1915341.jpg|1917367]: as an psychologist in the army, Kraft was an officer and subject to less...scrutiny? Indignity? And, in any case, when she decided that she wanted to continue to work with the army but no longer be up for deployment (i.e., work only stateside), that was a choice she could make. It's not something an average enlisted soldier can decide.
All of my [five] brothers and one sister [of two] ended up joining the Military, but different branches... So, when I turned seventeen the question never seemed to be if I would join the military or go to college. It was only, which branch of the military will it be? (61)
So he brings to this a different perspective than you might get otherwise, and a certain bluntness:
When I first thought about joining the military I took [a vocational aptitude test]. I got a great score and the Army told me I could have practically any job I wanted. I told the recruiter that I'd take whichever job had the highest bonus and the biggest kicker for school. He said an OR medic gets an eight thousand dollar bonus and a monthly GI bill kicker (for college) of three hundred and fifty dollars a month. He did explain what an OR medic actually does, but at the age of seventeen I was too busy daydreaming all of the magical things I could do with eight thousand dollars. (15)
Working on the Iraqi relaxes me a little bit. I know I'm doing my best to try to save him, but I also know that, truthfully, if he dies it won't be as big a deal as if an American dies. If that happened on my table everyone would read about it back in the States and his name would be in a wall, forever engraving my inability not [sic] to save his life. But if an Iraq [sic] dies, I know that most likely he will be given a paupers [sic] funeral and back in the States his name won't appear except as a statistic. (31)
I don't mean to suggest that Anthony's depiction of the situation is without any complexity—among other things, he is quick to note both that both Americans and Iraqis suffer from war in Iraq—but rather that he's coming at it from a different angle than, say, [b:Chris Coppola|6952515|Coppola A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq|Chris Coppola|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328774894s/6952515.jpg|7187231]. Did my fingers itch with desire to fix the damn proofreading already? Yes.* Did I sometimes sigh over the amount of judgement? Yes. But there's still something to be learned here.
*Or possibly they itched from eczema. Take your pick.