Under Fire
A pleasant little diversion in the wake of American Caesar, Manchester’s magisterial biography of Macarthur.
Griffin (a pen name) is a talented writer. I’m a progressive, a conscientious objector, and a pronounced military skeptic: he’s not, and you would not think he’d be my cup of tea, and yet Griffin does a nice job. He’s chiefly interested, I think, in a nuanced view of the masculine, and though everyone here is in the Marines and there’s a war on, violence seldom has anything to do with it. “You don’t have to practice being uncomfortable,” Ken McCoy assures his raw sergeant. “When it’s time for you to be uncomfortable, the Marine Corps will arrange for you to be uncomfortable.”