There is no doubt that when the American military goes to war, American popular culture tags along. Spend six weeks with the Marine Corps in the field and you’ll see. Paperback novels, movies on DVD, video games and music in various delivery systems are all so common you’d figure they were standard GI gear. The modern Marine doesn’t go anywhere without his daily dose of entertainment-style Americana. A few observations on Marine reading tastes: They’re big on war stories, sci-fi and adventure stories but not so eager for mysteries and courtroom dramas. The US fighting man — and woman — is simpatico with Robin Cook, Stephen Coonts, Stephen King and W.E.B. Griffith. But hundreds, maybe thousands, of copies of Sue Grafton, Scott Turow and Ann Rule are sitting unread from Baghdad to the Syrian border. Also, who is the well-meaning American who thought the troops needed Amy Vanderbilt’s Book of Etiquette? One Navy chaplain devoured a Louis L’Amour cowboy novel on a bumpy overland convoy in the back of a 7-ton truck. High-brow stuff is represented too. At the library at the base at Al Qaim, a corporal was reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. There was the gunnery sergeant who picked up a copy of Bob Woodward’s The Commanders and put it down like it had burned his fingers. He thought it was fiction, he said, not a recounting of the 1991 Persian Gulf War: “Been there, done that.’’ Music mostly breaks down into country-western and rap, the two favorites of American Forces Radio, which has a strong signal everywhere except along the Syrian border. In films, marines in an outpost outside Fallujah were partial to The Lord of the Rings and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers about an Army unit in World War II. Sometimes pop references creep into the official or unofficial names given to military operations. When the Marines went hunting for an Iraqi sniper of diminutive stature who had killed or wounded several troops the operation was called “Get Shorty.’’ And yes, Shorty was gotten. —Tony Perry Haditha Dam i Iraq / LATWP
