The view from the front lines

Two years ago, Doonesbury.com added a military blog to its site on Slate. Called The Sandbox, its editors sought, collected and lightly edited dispatches from men and women serving overseas and their friends and family back home.

Although Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" cartoon strip has a well-known liberal point of view, the stories reprinted in "The Sandbox: Dispatches From Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan" are apolitical. Congress and President Bush are as distant from these experiences as Baghdad is from Washington.

The collection is sharp, painful and sometimes comical. The authors explore friendship, service and longing during war.

A few writers are given multiple entries, providing the collection with continuity and a sense of growth and change in some of the soldiers. Air Force Capt. Doug Traversa, a Tennessee native deployed to Afghanistan, plumbs the gaps between Western culture and traditional Islam through a series of amusing dialogues with his interpreter, Hamid. The entries have no dates, and except for a few instances it's difficult to gauge when or exactly where the action occurs. But it carries plenty of action.

Army Sgt. Roy Batty discovers an old man curled up in the back of a pickup truck in a Baghdad alley. He appears to be comfortably asleep. He'd been shot in the head. Batty and his men suspect the Iraqi police working alongside his unit murdered the apparently innocent grandfather.

"I feel sorry for him in a general sort of way, although that emotion has been hard to come by lately. He is the fifth or sixth dead guy I have come across in the last month or so."

Nearly 300 pages of longing - soldiers for home, wives for husbands, fathers for sons and daughters - ends with Marine Sgt. Derek McGee's confused and stunning essay:

"I am home now; it's nice I guess. Things are different. So am I. It is hard to get excited about things, anything really. Food is all right; I get sort of excited about that, and women - well, one anyway. Maybe I'm more mature now; maybe I'm just bored, I don't know."

Although still incited by the memory of his platoon leader's death in the back of his armored truck, McGee stifles his anger.

"I have been punched on two different occasions since being home. Both times I froze and didn't do anything about it. I was afraid. It's not that I didn't know what to do. I do. I can. It wasn't that I was afraid of whomever it was that was punching me. I was afraid that if I started punching back, I wouldn't stop.

"The last time I punched back, I stood in the turret of a Humvee and sent 400 rounds of 7.62-mm, belt-fed ammunition into a residential neighborhood, into houses, people's houses and there was a mosque there, too."

In "The Sandbox," the warriors win no clear victories. Their battle is often to understand what's going on.

Army Staff Sgt. David Bellavia left home in western New York to become a man. He spent six years in the infantry and recounts his time in Iraq in "House to House: A Soldier's Memoir." Written with John R. Bruning, the 2007 book has recently been reissued in paperback.

Bellavia's story follows the well-beaten path of the war hero: from callow youth to professional soldier to bloodied and victorious combat veteran. His unit from 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry, known as the Ramrods, engaged in the vicious battle of Fallujah in 2004.

Action springs from the pages. After delays, ambushes and skirmishes, Bellavia's mission culminates with a room-to-room battle inside a booby-trapped house. An insurgent screams praises to Allah as Bellavia readies for close-quarters combat. The soldier fires back with a line from "The Exorcist."

Battle on. "Somebody must die now. There is no turning back," he writes. "I bring my rifle to the ready-up position. The M16 feels right; it is exactly what I need right now."

The body-count meter starts to spin.

Some anecdotes and exchanges between soldiers sound Hollywood-ready, bruising an otherwise muscular account of the grunt's life.

Perhaps the most interesting payoff comes in an afterword written for the paperback. Bellavia becomes more introspective as he celebrates Christmas with his family. He has left the Army, and three years have passed since his time in Iraq.

A scene of his two preschool sons hugging each other triggers a memory from Fallujah, where Bellavia saw two Iraqi brothers die together.

"I can't help but dwell on that image in Fallujah now. Two brothers, two warriors. They died fighting. They went out hard. But did their parents ever find out what happened to them? And would it matter?"

Four years removed from combat, the war is still vivid in Bellavia's mind.

Louis Hansen, (757) 446-2322, louis.hansen@pilotonline.com