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We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
Peter Van Buren
Metropolitan Books, 2011
During World War II, journalist Ernie Pyle and cartoonist Bill Mauldin told the story of the war to Americans as though through the eyes of the "grunts" who slogged through the mud and lived in the foxholes. We could call this a "grunt-eyed view" of a war. It isn't the same perspective as one would get from a distance. A detached overview reveals some truths, and they are to be taken seriously; but a view as seen by those who experienced the war at ground level brings its own truths into focus - and these, too, are worth taking seriously. Even though they may in part be the same truths, they take on an enhanced reality by having been experienced directly.
Peter Van Buren doesn't quite fit the image of a "grunt." He was a veteran 23-year foreign service officer in the U.S. State Department when he served a year in Iraq in 2009. But he did work at ground level amid the grime and the heat, first at Forward Operating Base Hammer "in the middle of nowhere" in the desert "halfway between Baghdad and Iran" and then at Forward Operating Base Falcon on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. He shared the life and circumstances of the troops with which he was embedded. By no means was his a comfortable sinecure situated in the enormous "World's Biggest Embassy" in the city, with its replication of the American home environment.
Van Buren tells the story of the American attempts at the reconstruction of Iraq as he witnessed them out in the field. His narrative carries him through his year there, with considerable commentary along the way. An aspect of his account that adds to its verisimilitude, albeit superficially, is his profane way of telling the story. The book is full of sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, honest description, well-crafted turns of phrase - and scatological humor. The last of these has caused some reviewers to think the book quite amusing - "laugh out loud funny." We, however, were sufficiently absorbed in the other qualities that the profane language seemed more like an unnecessary and...