(Image Credit: Bloomsbury.com)
Savage, filthy, honest, and unflinching, Eat The Apple is a no holds barred reminiscence of an egregious youth who joins the Marine Corps aged following a car crash on an inebriated night. After crashing his car into a fire hydrant, eighteen-year-old Matt Young impulsively enlists himself into the Marines.
After being put through the wringers at Camp Pendleton, Young is sent out for deployment in the ravaged terrains of Iraq. Young recounts in a lacerating manner, his experience in the war-torn desert. Self-deprecation juxtaposes with barely hidden obscenity as torn limbs share space with compulsive masturbation. In fact, an entire chapter is devoted to the act of self-gratification! When not hanging precariously to the sides of a toppled Humvee, Young finds himself obsessively smoking, getting dead drunk and brawling with his mates.
Young’s irascible and irreverent account is not just a pungent jeremiad on the futility of war. It is also a railing against an establishment that harbours more secrets than it can store and has the right to store. Accounts of ‘vulnerable’ marines going ‘missing’ – a la the unforgettable Hollywood blockbuster ‘A Few Good Men’ -, racial slurs being leveled at people of colour all blow the cover open on an institution otherwise glorified for its achievements.
Eat The Apple is an unflinching confession of spectacular human failings and the realisation of the same. Infidelity, selfishness, hatred, recrimination, and remorse all contrive to produce a roiling concoction of uncontained emotions. Getting fellated by random women with a fiancé waiting at home or shooting down stray mongrels in Iraq just for the ‘kick’ of it, Young chronicles his time with the Marines in short, crisp Chapters that explode at the reader in the same way bullets whiz around soldier and civilian heads in a staccato burst.
“We think we need to find a dog to stroke, a baby to coddle. We destroy the picture and reinforce the packaging that houses the person-thing with positive thoughts and exercise and whatever other coping mechanisms we have developed. But even as we rip the picture to shreds and our eyes well with tears for our once-lost humanity, we feel the person-thing slithering along the walls of its makeshift cell, waiting.”
The title is drawn from a Marine Corps saying, “eat the apple; (expletive) the corps,” meant both as a play on words and an insult to the Corps, often by a departing Marine. The most haunting and evocative part of the book deals with Young’s return from his very first Iraqi deployment. Drinking himself senseless, Young begins to ramble spinning layers of fantastic events, occurrences and thrills that never took place. As he keeps blabbering away with a misty head, he fails to appreciate the fact that his family squirming in embarrassment is pleading with him silently to halt the gibberish.
Not for the faint hearted, Eat The Apple F*ck The Corps does not meld itself to the normal military genre. It may also not appeal to the senses and sensitivities. Graphic, unrepentant and even downright ugly in bits and snatches, this is a polemic that blends barely disguised vitriol with self-deprecating wit. More than everything else, it is also an unabashed and unashamed indictment of aggression resorted to without regard for cause and unmindful of consequence.
