This American soldier's narrative clunks, rattles and lurches along like his tank

TOM CLONANreviews Beyond Duty: Life on the Frontline in IraqBy Shannon P Meehan Wiley, 270pp, £20

CAPTAIN SHANNON Meehan is a public affairs officer with the US military at Fort Hood, Texas. Beyond Duty is a troubling and problematic account of his first tour of duty in Iraq before and during the US “troop surge” of 2007. Meehan – an Irish American – served as a tank commander in Diyala Province north of Baghdad.

Meehan’s experiences of combat are brief and sporadic. The book revolves around a small number of minor combat actions among the villages and suburbs in and around Baquba, including the destruction of an Iraqi house in Dojima by tank fire – an action for which Meehan received the US Bronze Star – the capture of a number of suspected Shia militants in Qwaylis and the deaths of three US soldiers in a botched house-clearance operation in Mujima in 2007. Meehan’s accounts of these incidents are mediated somewhat by his role as a tank commander confined inside a main battle tank. As such, the immediacy of combat is absent from many of his accounts and the narrative is often taken up with laborious descriptions of the discomforts inside his tank and tedious descriptions of crew uniforms, weapons and equipment.

While tedium interspersed with violence is to be expected in combat and accounts of war, Meehan’s writing style is awkward. The narrative clunks, rattles and lurches along like his tank. His style is grandiose and he appears to be obsessed with his status as an officer and a leader of men in battle. The opening line, “That day I served as company commander, I painted my helmet gold”, gives some indication of what is to follow in a book that reveals the fragile ego and naivete of an immature young man who finds himself at war among a people and culture he does not understand. Also troubling is the extent to which the plight of ordinary Iraqi civilians is almost absent from Meehan’s ruminations. The denouement lies in Meehan’s account of an incident in which he ordered a missile strike on a house in Baquba in 2007. An entire family was killed. Meehan sums the incident up – and perhaps the whole book – thus: “I went to Iraq to serve my country and I think I made a difference. But while I was there I killed some people who did not deserve to die.”

Meehan presents this horrific incident as an unanticipated consequence of fighting a counter-insurgency war among the Iraqi civilian population. Like Capt Meehan, I have first-hand experience of combat waged among civilians. Unlike Meehan, I recognise that the unlawful deaths of innocent men, women and children in such circumstances are inevitable. Meehan employs military jargon and confessional rhetoric to present this sordid incident as an unexpected tragedy, in quasi-heroic terms. He is to be commended for revealing much about the gung-ho psychology of the US military and the attitudes of its combat commanders towards civilians and “collateral” damage. While the book does not commend itself as a fluid or lyrical account of war, its stop-start clumsiness will shock, if not awe.

Dr Tom Clonan is The Irish Timessecurity analyst. He is a fellow of Armed Forces and Society, a US military and academic research organisation based at Loyola University, Chicago