What do you think?
Rate this book
The Strong Man
The Strong Man is one hell of a book. Matt Briggs writes about both going to war, and coming home, and the ways in which, for some of us, war and home seem oddly merged these days, the way we make war now. This story is populated with characters who matter and whose lives will touch you. A fine piece of work from a very talented writer. — Robert Bausch, author of Out of Season and The Gypsy Man
About The Strong Man
An Army Reservist, Ben Wallace, is a reluctant member of the U.S. Army Reserve. Yet, when he is called to duty in Operation Desert Shield, he realizes he wants to experience what his grandfather calls, “The Enlightenment of War.” He initially joined the Army as a form of rebellion against his father—a Vietnam era draft dodger—and as a way to be closer to his is grandfather. His grandfather is a veteran of Guam. Wallace needs to experience combat, he thinks, to make himself a man.
Several things make this unlikely. Wallace is, first of all, a Laboratory Technician in a General Hospital. Second of all, every aspect of modern warfare isolates the soldiers from the discomforts and realities of the conflict. They have comfortable uniforms made from hi-tech microfibers, access to phones to call home at any time, rations designed by master chefs.
Wallace also becomes entangled in the schemes of a profiteering sergeant, Philip Mice. Mice needs Wallace, for his physical strength, to defeat a rival sergeant and to manage the enlisted men while Mice establishes a business trading in contraband. When the hospital arrives in Saudi Arabia, Mice sets up a thriving trade in homebrewed beer, used furniture, and bacon. The trade deals in comfort items designed to alleviate what little discomfort that remains among the soldiers. When Wallace and Mice and finally dispose of the rival sergeant, Wallace realizes Mice will never arrange for Wallace’s transfer to a field hospital near the front lines as long as he remains useful to him. When Wallace threatens to turn himself over to the MPs, Mice quickly transfers Wallace to a field hospital. Following the First Infantry’s advance on Basra, Wallace encounters his first surrendered Iraqis. The persistent unreality of the American Army’s war begins to slip away. When he faces the remains of retreating Iraqi soldiers destroyed on the highway to Basra, he finally experiences “The Enlightenment of War,” even though at this point he would rather remain unenlightened.
About The Strong Man
An Army Reservist, Ben Wallace, is a reluctant member of the U.S. Army Reserve. Yet, when he is called to duty in Operation Desert Shield, he realizes he wants to experience what his grandfather calls, “The Enlightenment of War.” He initially joined the Army as a form of rebellion against his father—a Vietnam era draft dodger—and as a way to be closer to his is grandfather. His grandfather is a veteran of Guam. Wallace needs to experience combat, he thinks, to make himself a man.
Several things make this unlikely. Wallace is, first of all, a Laboratory Technician in a General Hospital. Second of all, every aspect of modern warfare isolates the soldiers from the discomforts and realities of the conflict. They have comfortable uniforms made from hi-tech microfibers, access to phones to call home at any time, rations designed by master chefs.
Wallace also becomes entangled in the schemes of a profiteering sergeant, Philip Mice. Mice needs Wallace, for his physical strength, to defeat a rival sergeant and to manage the enlisted men while Mice establishes a business trading in contraband. When the hospital arrives in Saudi Arabia, Mice sets up a thriving trade in homebrewed beer, used furniture, and bacon. The trade deals in comfort items designed to alleviate what little discomfort that remains among the soldiers. When Wallace and Mice and finally dispose of the rival sergeant, Wallace realizes Mice will never arrange for Wallace’s transfer to a field hospital near the front lines as long as he remains useful to him. When Wallace threatens to turn himself over to the MPs, Mice quickly transfers Wallace to a field hospital. Following the First Infantry’s advance on Basra, Wallace encounters his first surrendered Iraqis. The persistent unreality of the American Army’s war begins to slip away. When he faces the remains of retreating Iraqi soldiers destroyed on the highway to Basra, he finally experiences “The Enlightenment of War,” even though at this point he would rather remain unenlightened.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
8 people want to read
About the author
Matt Briggs
18 books69 followersMatt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs’s zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 29, 2010
Novels of war are of perpetual interest. The moral concern and earnestness at the heart of such stories can be told in a variety of ways. From the nightmare of front lines combat to the echo of remembered trauma, war stories capture the human animal in his most naked state. Matt Briggs's novel, The Strong Man, is a tale of men (and a few women) on the edge of the battlefield in the First Gulf War, a war massive in scope yet bizarrely tangential, victorious but bathetic. Like Anthony Swofford's memoir of this same strange war, Jarhead, The Strong Man presents the addled and addling movements of an American military trying to determine the shape of its own raison d'etre in a war that seems to always occur just over the horizon.
Briggs's novel is suitably tight in its focus given the historical sprawl of his subject, treating the story from the perspective of PFC Ben Wallace, an Army Reserve medical lab technician, suddenly activated along with other “citizen/soldiers” of the Yakima branch of the reserve station, a group of malcontents that would make most soldiers request a unit transfer. In fact, this is exactly what Wallace tries to do, claiming a desire to see the front lines of combat instead of the urinalysis screening detail in a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia hospital. However, because of his great physical strength accomplished through a punishing weightlifting routine, Wallace's efforts are quietly misdirected by Sergeant Mice, a war profiteer that traffics in health and comfort items from leather recliners to bacon. The tension with Mice as a small-time hood and Wallace's desire to experience the “real” world of combat, informs much of the novel.
Briggs is brilliant in his moments that address the removal of the human element from modern warfare, the commonplace absurdities of set-piece battles. For instance, the following excerpt, treating Wallace's idea of his role in combat, shows a resignation and haplessness that is the epitome of technocratic fatalism:
"My life was at risk in a geological way. If I died, I would die because I was in the wrong blast zone on the wrong tactical map at the wrong time. Nothing I did personally had anything to do with the enemy's survival or death. I operated my machine—a urinalysis machine. My comrades operated their machines—a Bradley tank, an F-14, a B-52—and so this didn't feel like an experience of war as much as shift work."
Wallace, however, does eventually have the chance to see the war up close, or at least the remnants of it, but finds it too is sanitized and abstracted, removed from the hyperreality he has sought out, indicating that any experience of war is partial and largely mistranslated.
Briggs has made a great stride for independent writing with a novel that is strong in execution and socially relevant. He continues to develop as writer to watch and seek out.
Briggs's novel is suitably tight in its focus given the historical sprawl of his subject, treating the story from the perspective of PFC Ben Wallace, an Army Reserve medical lab technician, suddenly activated along with other “citizen/soldiers” of the Yakima branch of the reserve station, a group of malcontents that would make most soldiers request a unit transfer. In fact, this is exactly what Wallace tries to do, claiming a desire to see the front lines of combat instead of the urinalysis screening detail in a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia hospital. However, because of his great physical strength accomplished through a punishing weightlifting routine, Wallace's efforts are quietly misdirected by Sergeant Mice, a war profiteer that traffics in health and comfort items from leather recliners to bacon. The tension with Mice as a small-time hood and Wallace's desire to experience the “real” world of combat, informs much of the novel.
Briggs is brilliant in his moments that address the removal of the human element from modern warfare, the commonplace absurdities of set-piece battles. For instance, the following excerpt, treating Wallace's idea of his role in combat, shows a resignation and haplessness that is the epitome of technocratic fatalism:
"My life was at risk in a geological way. If I died, I would die because I was in the wrong blast zone on the wrong tactical map at the wrong time. Nothing I did personally had anything to do with the enemy's survival or death. I operated my machine—a urinalysis machine. My comrades operated their machines—a Bradley tank, an F-14, a B-52—and so this didn't feel like an experience of war as much as shift work."
Wallace, however, does eventually have the chance to see the war up close, or at least the remnants of it, but finds it too is sanitized and abstracted, removed from the hyperreality he has sought out, indicating that any experience of war is partial and largely mistranslated.
Briggs has made a great stride for independent writing with a novel that is strong in execution and socially relevant. He continues to develop as writer to watch and seek out.
Displaying 1 of 1 review