Eat the Apple

Starred review from September 25, 2017
In this bold memoir, ex-Marine Young examines how war transformed him from a confused teenager into a dangerous and damaged man. Fresh from high school and with no direction, Young walked into a Marine recruitment center in 2005 and sealed his fate. Soon he was suffering the indignities of basic training before being deployed to “the sandbox” in Iraq, where he sweated, masturbated, shot stray dogs, and watched friends get blown up. Despite the constant misery and suffocating discipline, Young reenlisted twice more and even volunteered for Iraq on his last tour. Brief stints in the U.S. that blurred away into drunken violence and infidelity made war seem far safer to Young than civilian life. Eschewing first-person memoir conventions, Young, now a creative-writing professor at Centralia College, presents his experiences through a broad range of narrative approaches—second person, third person, first-person plural, screenplay, crude drawings, invented dialogue between various selves, etc. There’s real risk of trivializing the material, but Young matches his stylistic daring with raw honesty, humor, and pathos. Comparisons to Michael Herr’s Dispatches, about the Vietnam War, are apt, but where Herr searched for thrills and headlines as a journalist, Young writes from a grunt’s perspective that has changed little since Roman legionnaires yawned through night watch on Hadrian’s Wall: endless tedium interrupted by moments of terror and hilarity, all under a strict regime of blind obedience and foolish machismo.

Starred review from November 15, 2017

Young, a fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and creative writing professor at Centralia College, WA, tells of being a U.S. marine and serving three tours in Iraq in the mid-to-late 2000s. He does not sugarcoat the details of war or ask for forgiveness; in fact, he is not sure that he wants readers to thank him for his service. Each chapter is brief, three to four pages, and presented in varying formats, such as a screenplay and thoughts in first, second, and third person. Some chapters are written to the author's past self from his future self and one section is an apology letter to a cabbie he punched after his third tour. The difficulty of basic training is contrasted with the boredom and brutality of combat. Young's actions--cheating on his fiance, surviving an IED explosion, holding a severed head--may cause revulsion among readers or may lead to sympathy. VERDICT This honest war memoir will shock and horrify, will cause readers to tear up, and will make them wish they could tell a 19-year-old marine that everything will be okay. Highly recommended for all collections.--Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2017
In this debut memoir, Young (English/Centralia Coll.) reflects on his experiences joining the Marine Corps at the age of 18 and his subsequent tour in Iraq.The author, who teaches creative writing and composition, uses a variety of literary styles, but he is straightforward about his own shortcomings: "You've chosen the United States Marine Corps infantry based on one thing: you got drunk and crashed your car into a fire hydrant sometime in the early morning and think--because your idea of masculinity is severely twisted and damaged by the male figures in your life and the media with which you surround yourself--that the only way to change is the self-flagellation achieved by signing up for war." Throughout the book, Young pays homage to many clear influences, not least Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (1979) and its film adaptation, Full Metal Jacket, as well as Anthony Swofford's Jarhead (2003) and Tim O'Brien's similarly episodic The Things They Carried (1990). The shock and trauma of war come into play in Young's stories, but he also gives equal time to discussions of boredom, masturbation, infidelity, shame, and regret, all rendered in a caustically humorous tone. With chapters such as "How to Ruin a Life," "How to Throw a Drunken Punch," and "How to Feel Ashamed for Things You Never Did," the author performs a certain amount of literary alchemy, using style and the space between memory and fiction to transform his raw experiences into self-lacerating works of art. By the time the end comes, after three combat deployments, he was a changed man. "I have acted like a bullet," he writes. "I entered lives and bounced and ricocheted and broken and torn. Now I am going to exit one life and that life will have no say."A real war story told in fragments by a gifted young writer trying to come to grips with his experiences.

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Starred review from December 1, 2017
If Young enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 2005 out of a post-high-school lack of direction or general brokenness, the next half decade and its accompanying three tours of Iraq would take him further from any certainty and crush him into more and smaller pieces still. His memoir is creatively told in atmospheric and gut-checking essays, some of which include lists, quizzes, or the author's stick-figure drawings. As often as he is I, the author also addresses himself as you, past-me, the boy, this recruit, or we, the collective voice of his fleet. Young sobs in bathrooms; learns to shoot a gun; drinks too much; smokes countless cigarettes; masturbates to pass the time; cheats on his fiancee; loses friends; doesn't die; doesn't kill anyone else; doesn't know what to talk about with civilians. He gets hurt and now knows the places beyond his body where that hurt will live forever. Readers will wonder how people are expected to fight wars at alllet alone survive them. Young's visceral prose, honed in college and writing programs after his tours of duty, confronts shame, guilt, and pain without flinching yet is beyond sympathetic to its subject; it is another act of service.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)