Thomas J. Brennan and Finbarr O'Reilly, Shooting Ghosts (2017) — a review

08 January 2018

Outstanding

Shooting Ghosts (Viking 2017) documents two men's injured returns from war. The coauthored book documents the difficulties of letting go of wounded pasts and successfully grappling with ambiguous futures.

Marine sergeant Thomas Brennan was blown up by a rocket propelled grenade in Afghanistan.

And combat photographer Finbarr O'Reilly, who had photographed the immediate aftermath the blast that changed Brennan's life, eventually fell into clinical depression, having spent too many years covering one senseless war after another.

Shooting Ghosts primarily addresses . . .

. . . these topics:

traumatic brain injury

post-traumatic stress disorder

war's psychic lure

the institutionalized process of human betrayal

grieving

importance of family

and

the criticality of personal meaning

The writing is clear and penetrating.

Not a book for voyeurs

This is not a good book for action wannabes. For instance, an Amazon (two star) review commented that:

I am always trying to find good combat books. This is not one. He meanders a lot. He never drew me into his experience.

To grasp Shooting Ghosts' well-articulated observations, most readers will have to have lived them, even if in other contexts. Without personal experience, most people's imagination and empathy are challenged to understand grief of the magnitude portrayed, betrayal, TBI and moral injury.

Sample excerpts

The point of the book

We both chose to go to war. We seek no sympathy or pity. What we're trying to figure out now is how we can lead purposeful lives after experiencing the sense of loss and the meaningless wrought by war. The last thing we want to do is perpetuate the myth of the trauma hero.

Brennan, shortly after being caught in an RPG's blast zone

I know exactly what I need to do to untie my boots, but my fingers won't cooperate. It's like my hands aren't listening to my brain.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the signature war wound of both Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 357,048 U.S. service members have suffered traumatic brain injuries.

I fail the [automated neuropsychological assessment metrics] test several days in a row, which leaves me frustrated and depressed.

Many months later, Brennan is told that a golf ball-sized part of his brain's frontal lobe has been damaged, evidently as a result of the grenade blast (at page 166).

Keeping track of death

Corporal Brian Scearse is so quiet that it takes me awhile to even notice he's part of TJ's [Brennan] squad.

A sleeve of tattoos covers Scearse's entire left arm, with skulls representing every person he knows who has been killed during the past eleven years of warfare. There are thirty-two skulls.

"It's something that I look at every day and it just reminds me what I'm here for and what I signed up for."

O'Brien, on warriors' motivation

[H]owever futile the war may seem to the men fighting it, and no matter how shitty the conditions, the one thing Marines can fight for is one another.

And when things go wrong, it provokes feelings of failure and guilt, just as it did for TJ after he was injured.

O'Brien, on seeing the familiarly awful

Corpses have spent weeks melting in the dripping heat. They fall apart when lifted, spilling cascades of writhing maggots onto the ground, like rice pouring from a torn sack. Flaked skin peels away and teeth tumble from vanished gums.

O'Brien, on futility

There's no joy in getting a good picture from a baby's funeral. Another victim, another memory, another ghost. There are many by now, and army of ghosts dwelling in the shadows of my mind.

The world appears indifferent to atrocities, abuse, corruption, profound immorality, and hardship, or at least is helpless to address them.

Brennan's experience with killed children

Iraqi insurgents had targeted Brennan's Marines with a machine gun. After retaliating with his SMAW rocket, Brennan went to see the damage his rocket had caused.

Two insurgents were dead. But in the room's corner lay two blast-mutilated children:

Why were they here? Those kids weren't shooting the machine guns. They aren't the enemy. They don't deserve this.

I walk away from the building in silence, my head hanging low, filled with shame. We move on to clear the next building.

Brennan, on expectations

When most people tell someone, "See you tomorrow," they believe that they will. I no longer take such things for granted.

[F]or hours I lie awake envisioning dead friends and missed funerals. I worry that Fin's could be held in the not-so-distant future.

I'm trapped inside the distorted mind-set of a warrior. Our universe is unpredictable, random, and unsafe.

My idea of a safe and just world had been shattered. At least that's one thing I share with the Iraqi and Afghan civilians we were sent to help.

Brennan, regarding one aspect of institutional betrayal

The brotherhood of men that swears to be "ever loyal, ever faithful" is about to cut me loose.

One of Thomas Brennan's observations is that the American military still does not recognize the moral costs of war, as those medically play out in the psyches of a substantial number of extensive combat-involved veterans.

This macho organizational perspective means that a substantial number of people continue to improperly categorize injured troops as whiners. That assessment denies both morality and the human condition. The attitude leaves many wounded vets to fend for themselves, once they come home.

Brennan also makes a key administrative point. When assessing the proportion of combatants emotionally injured by war, one should (but the U.S. does not) distinguish between:

(a) people who were assigned to combat zones — of whom there are many

and

(b) those who participated, at repeated length, in actual combat — of whom there are comparatively few.

O'Brien, on the concept of moral injury

TJ had committed the most intimate act possible. He killed a fellow human being and knelt over him in a murderous rage, watching the man die from the wounds he had inflicted. We are socially programmed not to kill, and there are few things more damaging to the human psyche than betraying one's own moral code.

The VA definition of moral injury involves "an act of transgression that creates dissonance and conflict because it violates assumptions and beliefs about right and wrong and personal goodness."

For many veterans moral injury is the deep philosophical anguish and the sense of betrayal over being led into battle and killing for a country whose reasons for waging war unraveled, destroying any belief that the mission served some concept of the greater good.

"If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves," wrote Aldous Huxley.

Brennan, on the same subject

Some of the vets reveal to me the details of events that they don't want repeated — stories of prisoners being mistreated, even executed in moments of rage, or shot to end their suffering. Others tell me of mass slaughter. The line of morality in war is not clearly defined.

That power over life becomes addicting. Very addicting. You miss it. You daydream about it. When I pulled the trigger, I was God.

O'Brien, regarding media complicity in warmongering

Every day in Gaza's morgues I elbow my way through crowds of mourners and photographers, step through pools of blood, and take pictures of mutilated bodies and piles of corpses.

One afternoon I'm inside a morgue during a relative lull. . . . a worker opens a drawer containing the bodies of three children. It's nothing I haven't seen and photographed a dozen times already . . . .

I'm overcome by a physical wave of sadness. I can hardly breathe.

[T]he propaganda machines and lobby groups on both sides of the conflict are working around the clock to get their version of the story heard. It's a cynical game with civilians trapped in the middle.

Photography for me has always been about illustrating the common threads connecting disparate lives, with a view to building empathy and understanding. But the only common thread here seems to be a mutual hatred and the lust for destruction of the other.

By contributing to the steady flow of images from the war, I feel somehow complicit in perpetuating the endless spectacle of violence . . . .

War has become too sad for me to endure.

O'Brien's conclusion — based on the many wars and conflicts that he has documented

That war in its naked essence is masturbatory seems undeniable: the pornographic arousal of training, the deployment boner, and the climax of combat, followed by the detusmescence of returning home, complete with feelings of postorgasmic guilt and shame, not to mention the eventual desire to do it again, if only because it's easier than the alternative.

No wonder young men like it so much.

Rather than bringing about peace and stability, the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have only made matters worse . . . and in ways that have disrupted the global balance and upturned the political order in the U.S. and across Europe.

On a personal level TJ and I feel bitter and betrayed by our youthful ideals and by the institutions that sent us so willingly to war. They got what they wanted and, I guess, so did we.

[T]rying to fit back into an individualistic society removed from the unifying experience of combat can leave men nostalgic for the simplicity and urgency of life at war and for the closeness they felt while there.

Much richer than the above passages, alone, suggest

For people who have had at least glimpses of the personal issues addressed, Shooting Ghosts is soulfully rich.

Brennan writes with short-sentenced, truthful immediacy. His text is consistently and personally gut-twisting. Especially so, with regard to his seemingly lost family and his suicide attempt. Both of these are subjects that non-combatants, presumably, can relate to.

O'Brien writes with similar intensity, but supported by nuanced philosophical and historical insight. His perspective is geographically broader and humanistically deeper than Brennan's. O'Brien is the sage that brings wide-ranging applicability to the book's combined texts.

The moral? — For the right readers, Shooting Ghosts is genius

If you are well connected to soul and are concerned about the United States' too many wars and what those do to people — give Shooting Ghosts a shot.

But be warned. Readers who have experienced issues that this book addresses will revisit their pain. That's what I mean by truthful immediacy.

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Thomas J. Brennan and Finbarr O'Reilly, Shooting Ghosts (2017) — a review