It was my first time. The experience was not as sexy as the first R-rated movie I snuck into (Purple Rain) or as violent and arty as the last (Full Metal Jacket), nor as trippy as the first time I did psilocybin mushrooms (yes, the leaves on that oak tree spoke to my most inner being). This first time was a let-down.
Like so many first times, an inequality existed: The school board members would not call or text before, during, or after they had their way with me. We were total strangers. If they’d asked, I would’ve talked about my book with them, told them what I really needed, and asked them the same. But I was blind to their intentions and gagged. I should’ve seen it coming. But hey, it was their first time too, so maybe I should be proud.
In the last few years the number of banned books has risen at an alarming rate. The targets of this dangerous trend have overwhelmingly been authors of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community whose books deal with issues of identity and equality, the kinds of books that might save a young person’s life. As a straight, white male writer who has written almost exclusively about the military and warfare, I might have thought my books were safe.
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But recently, in Ottawa County, Michigan the Board of Education for Hudsonville Public Schools voted 4-3 to ban my book Jarhead from the high school library. Apparently the place is a hot mess of MAGA intrusionists, an area traditionally very Americana genteel in self-styling and brand but newly mired in the divisive politics that have seen popular and acclaimed books banished from library shelves across the nation. In the fall of 2022 the MAGA insurgents on the school board introduced a new policy allowing any school district community member to object to the presence of a book in a school library. A citizen apparently had Jarhead, my best-selling 2003 memoir about being a marine in the first Gulf War (later a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal), in their culture warrior sights, and it was the first book to undergo the district’s removal process.
The objections included that the book was an “extremely violent, vulgar, pornographic diatribe,” which sounds like just the kind of book a teenager investigating war might need to read. The seven-person academic advisory committee made up of teachers, parents, and administrators read the book and unanimously recommended to the school board that Jarhead remain in circulation. But at a two-hour May 15 meeting on the proposed Jarhead removal, the board voted 4-3 to yank the book from the stacks.
Jarhead had been checked out a mere 21 times in nearly 20 years in circulation at the high school. I have no idea who those young readers were, but I doubt that any of my content or language damaged them or compromised their morals. Most often denounced is the “field fuck” hazing scene in which, for the benefit of gathered reporters while we were decked out in full nuclear, biological, chemical protective gear, we simulated rough gay sex on a number of fellow Marines.
This bit of drama might be shocking to civilians but to Marine grunts going to war in 1990 it was just another day at the desert office. And, it’s damn funny. It would be years before I understood the homoerotic nature of the hazing and the meta layers of meaning in terms of who, what, and why we were symbolically fucking. But over the years many bright teenagers have offered me layered exegeses concerning the scene, noting the sexualized self- and group harm and release we are performing out of frustration, fear, and excitement and in service of a carnal, combat-centric camaraderie. Yes, parents, it’s homoerotic, but so what? So is Sesame Street.
Other complaints addressed by the committee and board were that the book was unpatriotic and offensive to veterans. Veterans who don’t agree with my take on war and warriors are often staunch defenders of my right to tell my autobiographical version of that most American of stories: a young man going off to war. Many veterans would be offended that someone took the liberty of being offended for them and banned the transmission of the ideas within the book's covers.
Books (well, good books) are first and foremost ideas. Shortly after our founding as a country, racial equality became the most dangerous idea engaging the body politic. This remains true today. But other dangerous ideas now apparently include voting rights, bodily autonomy, and the concept that there are more views than one concerning how and why America fights wars.
Given that the U.S. is currently involved in a proxy war with Russia, in which we have spearheaded all aspects of the Ukrainian war effort by providing huge amounts of cash, weapons systems, ammunition, intelligence, cyber warfare capabilities—everything short of traditional soldier boots on the ground—it seems like a good time to ensure student access to all points of view concerning warfare. The metronomical pace of America’s conduct of armed conflict means that today’s high schoolers will be in their 20s when our armies again hit a foreign shore for another little war.
When I started writing Jarhead I had read nothing about my war other than RAND reports, newspaper articles, and the various officer memoirs that invariably follow every conflict. I had modest goals for my first book. I didn’t think about sales numbers or a movie option or foreign rights and invitations to international book fairs. I didn’t even know those things existed. Still heavily inhaling the fumes of pretension I’d earned at my MFA writing program, I wanted only to make art.
I thought I possessed a number of unique and original insights about the making of young Marines and going to war and what combat does to a young psyche and soul. I thought that on most days I could manage to turn out a page or two of good sentences. I wrote the best book I could. I wanted my book to teach young people things about war I hadn’t been taught or hadn’t wanted to learn when I was a 17-year-old looking to escape a dull suburban life that felt like a prison. I wrote an honest book, and I thought that that honesty would be the book’s spine and help sustain it in the world.
That 20 years later a politically stacked school board can, over a matter of a few months and a two hour meeting, cancel access to my work and the experiences of me and my fellow marines feels deeply un-American.
But perhaps now I have a new group of comrades, banned writers: Ibi Zoboi, Raina Telgameier, Laura Steven, John Steinbeck. The ranks will grow. The book bans will keep coming, although, as in Ottawa County, the banners like to play with language, and call them removals because that must sound less restrictive.
Make no mistake, they are banning books, but really they are restricting access to ideas. And when one small group of people ban a larger group of people access to ideas, we are in for a closing of the American mind. What begins with banning books ends with a firescape of constitutional rights ablaze. But the fire is already here on your block.
