War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones

#674
Title: War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones
Author/illustrator?: David Axe
Role unknown--illustrator?: Matt Bors
Publisher: NAL
Year: 2010
128 pages

I could see some uses for this book, say in an undergraduate class that looks at the difficulty of making meaning from trauma. However, it's not well-enough realized, and I wouldn't want to appear to endorse it. The introduction sets the tone, with his self-aggrandizing war junkie friend's assertion that middle class American life is boring and inconsequential. Not my middle class American life, buddy. My life is full of meaningful activities, love, relationships, vividness, and service, all in the context of my active awareness of my privilege as an economically secure person whose country is not embroiled in conflict. Generally I stop reading books that begin by insulting the general reader, but I figured, hey, it's not Axe's fault that his friend is a swaggering schmuck.

Sadly, Axe is little better, though he insults himself more actively and the reader more covertly. I'm sorry he's bored, and I'm sorry his life is never quite satisfying even when he's in a war, which is where he seems to want to be. I'm sorry that he lives with constant, simmering anger that he can't quite attach to anything. One shocking frame in this graphic autobiography expresses his dilemma when his girlfriend, another reporter, wants to travel to a war with him (when he's been calling his buddies and trying to get them to go to a war with him). He can't bring himself to tell her no, though he expresses this with an obscenity and hostility. So she's good enough to have sex with but it makes you angry when she wants to go with you because you'll have to behave better in the war? One hopes the girlfriend noticed this contempt and got out sooner rather than later.

As to Axe's musings about his reasons for wanting to be in war zones but not finding this satisfying, I found them not terribly coherent or compelling. Is it machismo? Existential emptiness? Unmentioned substance use troubles? Hard to guess. I don't know what Axe's in-person vibe is, but I imagine from this book that he's a person you edge away from at a party as he warms to his topic.

Whether he's a good war reporter/photographer, I don't know and I'm not moved to find out.