Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 29 -
War is a Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
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“There is a great tradition of very brilliant, outside-the-box, non-traditional, dynamic thinkers in the Marine Corps. . . . At the same time, our totem animal is the bulldog, not an animal known for its finesse.”
Zach Martin recently retired from the U.S. Marine Corps after 16 years in the service. But 25 years ago, he and your host were hyperliterate misfit high-school pals, trading Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch and Robert Anton Wilson novels. So how did he end up commanding Marine Recon forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as Maj. Zachary D. Martin?
“We greatly misunderstand the young men who go overseas and fight for us. We make them idols. They’re heroes, but we misunderstand what that means.”
We have a wide-ranging conversation about Zach’s career, the military’s risk-averse culture, the rise (and fall) of counterinsurgency strategy, what it’s like to give a kill order, how it felt to lose troops under his command, what it’s like to clear, hold and build a city in Afghanistan (and how it felt to see it all fall apart), how he fought all his best battles in Afghanistan wearing shorts and t-shirt, and more!
“The police we were training [in Afghanistan] were effective. I mean, they were gangsters, but provided you were willing to overlook their criminal activities, they were certainly maintaining order.”
We also discuss Virginia Postrel’s The Power of Glamour
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About our Guest
Major Zachary D. Martin (ret.) was most recently a member of Afghan National Police Advisor Team, and previously served as the Commanding Officer, Force Reconnaissance Company, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. His most recent deployment in that role was to Afghanistan in command of Company G, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines. He keeps a blog about his reading and writing at booksandmovement.net, where you can also find some of the articles he wrote during his career in the Marines.
Credits: This episode’s music is Life During Wartime by Talking Heads. The conversation was recorded at the home of a friend of Maj. Martin on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
! It’s a fine book about mismatched half-siblings brought together by calamity, set in an area of New Jersey overlooked by most everyone but its residents. Lisa and I have a fun conversation about her work and influences, how her science background informs her writing process (she’s a part-time cytotechnologist), why form has to rise from story, how to teach novel-writing, why she stands by Jonathan Franzen’s novels, how a Michael Cunningham short story changed her life, and whether southern NJ should secede and become America’s fifty-first state.
(River City Publishing), chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards, and was a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year and the Independent Publisher (IPPY) awards. Lisa’s short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review and other journals, and her essay, “Enchanted Night,” was published in 
(Simon & Schuster, 2007). She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She wrote a 
, how e-books have amplified 
, out this week from Doubleday Books.
(2008), 
(2010) and 
)
, 
, 
and 
. In collaboration with his brother Andrew, he drew 
, and his great solo work is the NCS, Ignatz, Eisner and Harvey Award-nominated comic book 
. He recently (late 2011 is recent, right?) published 
, a collection of 20 years of his strips. He currently lives in London with his wife Sylvie, their two children and a box of his own hair.
(University of Texas Press, 2008) and the author of the novel, 
(Dzanc and Low Fidelity Press, 2005). His short fiction has appeared in Esquire‘s Napkin Fiction Project (the piece was also selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Fiction anthology), Lewis University’s Jet Fuel Review, and the University of Maine’s Stolen Island. His short plays have been produced by Victory Gardens and Lifeline Theaters. He is married to Master Sommelier and television personality 
feeding into a 
. File-splitting was done in Audacity and all editing and processing was done in Garage Band on a Macbook Air. Photo of Charles Blackstone by me.
, 
, and 
). He is a contributor to Reason magazine, which led to the collection 
, and his work has appeared in Weirdo (where he served as managing editor), The Stranger, New York Press, Entertainment Weekly, Details, Seattle Weekly, Screw, and more. He is also the author of 
, 
, 
, 
, and 
, among other works.
Photo of Drew Friedman and Jerry Lewis courtesy of Jay Ruttenberg 
, published by Fantagraphics in 2010. His collection of portraits, 
, was published by Blast books in 2011. He has published three collections of paintings of Old Jewish Comedians (
, 
and 
), but none of Old Episcopal Comedians. He also raises champion beagles with his wife, K. Bidus. You can find his full bio and buy his art at 
and 
), the author who started him on his path, his balance between writing fiction and essays, how readers read and misread his work, his methods for fusing the personal and the critical, why students should read some of his essays before taking his classes, whether he considered going Hollywood, why and how he assembled 
anthology, and who his favorite New York Met is. (I was surprised by his answer to that last one.)
, 
, 
, 
, and 
,, as well as several novels and novellas, and three poetry collections, and has edited several anthologies, including 
. His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing. His two most recent books are the personal essay collection 
in their used section.
– Teju Cole – $7 – Just ‘cuz. If I don’t dig it, I can give it to a book-reading pal.
- Jaime Hernandez – $25 – Because one of my book-reading pals still has my copy of this enormous collection of Love & Rockets comics, and I’m afraid I’ll never get it back.
– Richard Powers – $5.99 – Suggested by upcoming podcast-guest David Rothenberg, partly in hopes of making Richard Powers another upcoming podcast-guest.
– Richard Powers – $5.99 – Ditto.
– Joseph Heller – $4.99 – Recommended by past podcast-guest 
– Nicholson Baker – $2.99 – Ditto, from the part when we talked about shitty novels coming out of the Bush era. He defended this one, so I figure I’ll give it a shot.
– Ada Louise Huxtable – $3.99 – Suggested by upcoming podcast-guest Phillip Lopate (in a list in the back of his collection 
– Charles Lamb – $2.99 – Another suggestion from Mr. Lopate.
