Eat the Apple

I don't know what to say about this book. I liked it and in some ways I was repulsed by it. IF you're former military, even if you don't like everything in it, I think you'll understand it. You may not agree with the author's opinions, but it's still easy to identify with his experiences. For a lot of guys, the military is a coming-of-age experience and you get a lot of really good and really bad examples to emulate. It's hard to resist the culture you are immersed in and to maintain your unique individuality when the pressure to conform to be just like your peers is so strong. You see a lot of jarring and unusual and different things. It's hard to chalk everyone up as a hero and it's hard to write off everything you experience as heroic. The author gives you an unflinching view of an un-heroic hero and some of the un-heroic things he saw, thought, and did and some of his journey back from the depths of despair to a normal life. That's painful to experience reading as a silent witness, but the author rewards us with his growth and recovery. I can identify with his bittersweet reminiscence and I really liked his imaginary conversation between his younger self in basic training and his modern self many years later.The author uses a very non-traditional approach in writing his book. Apparently, it was originally a series of essays that were edited into a book. This lends itself to the use of a variety of different approaches most authors would not use. It's hard to describe, and it can be jarring to go from a standard narrative to a cartoon to a script-style of writing, but it works and I guess it fits our modern short attention span. The occasional injury reports were also very interesting and sad to read.I would recommend this book for anyone who was in the military and is interested in digging into the deeper aspects of the experience, as well as people who are interested in soldiers and what they experience and family or friends of veterans who feel perplexed trying to understand why they seem so different from the folks they knew before enlisting.

Serving your country during a military conflict as an enlisted soldier looks better in war movies probably because war movies have a plot and a heroic morality and a conclusive ending, often involving self-discovery. The reality is being a soldier is less clear because in actuality most soldiers are only 18-22 years old going on 13 and they spend their tour either afraid of everything or bored out of their minds.Based on Matt Young’s memoir, military service in reality is actually a story consisting of disconnected, if sometimes vivid, uncomfortable and astonishing montage scenes, some of which you do not want to think about or acknowledge because you were either a bad person in the moment or really made a terrible mistake, or someone in your military brotherhood who you learned to love died.If you signed up to find yourself, what you found may not be as inspiring or meaningful as you hoped. If you signed up to test yourself, well, it seems the questions you had might turn out to have been the wrong ones. If you signed up because you were bored, you might realize there are worse things than boredom, like losing your sense of any human life consisting of eternal verities. However, being physically fit is the one Truth of being a Marine. Oorah.

This was written in a range of styles by a Marine some years distant from the events he depicts, after he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps, finished his formal education and has gone on to teach writing at the university level.Simultaneously brutal, amusing, graphic and wistful, this chaos of a book has all the subtlety of a train wreck. But that’s likely the point. It doesn’t take long to catch into the fact that not every person entering our military has noble motivations, or acts nobly when deployed. Not a surprise, nor is it a surprise that many come back as shells of themselves or otherwise ravaged physically or mentally. Maybe not always an enjoyable read, but, I think, an important one. The book probably falls on the more graphic and chaotic end of a continuum also occupied by books such as “yellow birds”, “redeployment” and “billy lynn’s long halftime walk”.At some point, someone might stand up and ask whether we have enough books that focus on this. We’re not there yet. After 17 years of constant fighting and deployment, I still don’t think many Americans completely get how fracturing these conflicts have been for those who served.

Preface -- was a junior enlisted with time in Iraq as well.I've read various memoirs and biographies of those who served during the recent wars. This is just...lacking. It has times it's really good. There are considerable portions in the first 50-60 pages or so it really begs you to keep going. But then there are certain things that stick out: - The author really likes stressing masturbation for some reason. There are like 3 chapters entirely devoted to this. No one wants to read about this, much less three whole chapters.- Much of this comes off as excessively whiny. It's easy enough to criticize things that happen at war without seeming like a whiny 20 year old about it.- The writing style is just really grating. The chapter that makes me put this down is the 'all of the above' chapter. It seems for the first few chapters this is written in a somewhat similar vein to The Things They Carried. As it goes longer it just seems like the author really tries to establish some unique footing in every chapter, focusing on anything but the actual story. It just reads like too much of a gimmick. One of the other reviews mentioned him being a creative writing teacher -- this rings clear. You do not need every chapter to attempt to have its own unique style especially when a good amount of them are really grating to read.I really, really, wanted to enjoy this. Reading these is cathartic for me. But this just seems like something a college freshman would write.

This is probably the absolute worst book i have ever attempted to read .