As a memoirist, I'm constantly in the position of having to distrust images that come to me embedded with deep, almost unassailably powerful reservoirs of feeling. The sound bytes in which I like to remember myself in kidhood as a wise and noble girl thriving in Dickensian circumstances don't account for the kid I shot at with a bee bee gun or picketing my neighbors' house (It was a union town) so other kids wouldn't play with them.

Case in point: for twenty years I remembered my teen years as the time my beloved, oil worker daddy had bailed out on me, when, in fact--as I examined those easy memories--I was the one who left him. I stopped squirrel-hunting and bass fishing and started reading and ingesting pharmaceuticals and protesting the war he supported. He still showed up at my job as a night switchboard operator bringing a supper plate covered in foil. Yes, there was a sad chasm between us as he stepped up the process of drinking himself to death. But as it widened, he stood on his side of it looking mournfully after me--not the other way round. I was trying to escape the Tropic of Squalor we were living in.

Only when you account for the interior life does its external expression makes sense. The truth ambushes me--not I it.

Also, to twist a phrase of war poet Randall Jarrell, history is long, and journalism is the insect of a day. People blame journalists for reductive sound byte-ism, but you can't file a story on deadline and know the inner lives of everybody in it.

Gourevitch has mounted an assault on half truths and temporality and war porn by trying to bring us the experience of soldiers whose culpability seems--at first glance, in sound byte--unassailable. History doesn't require him--or me--to rant against the national disgrace of Abu Ghraib, which is on a par with our own Uncivil War or Japanese internment camps or a Vietnam that could make a good man like Bob Kerry do things that shamed him for perpetuity. Soldiers trained not to think for themselves, rewarded for cruelty, then injected as if by pincers into a scene worthy of Dante...well, Gourevitch made them three dimensional for me.

That said, I wasn't even slightly surprised when some of the worst scenes--a man seemingly smeared in his own shit in the rain, or hung upside down by his heels from his bunk--were debunked completely. Gourevitch told the tale of the prisoner nicknamed Shitboy--a wholly unmanageable psychotic who'd eat his own excrement, smear himself with it, throw it at people. Shitboy hung himself upside down from his bunk by the ankles. Taken outside so the rain could clean him off, he rolled in mud. He thus appropriated the prevailing means of humiliation and used them to humiliate his captors, the way young black men have tried to do with the n-word. He came to resemble that other deranged prisoner, Gus, the one on the end of Lynndie England's leash, who was--in Gourevitch's fine interpretation-- "the freest man in Abu Ghraib."

But why--people ask--take a picture of it?

As someone who's gone through traumatic things and not been believed or understood, I find the picture-taking makes crazy sense. If--as my mother shot at my stepfather or my daddy--I'd had a camera! Even in adulthood, my sister and I maintained a fetishistic attachment to the bullet holes in our childhood kitchen. Age forty, we showed them to our suitors as part of the house tour. Long after we'd fixed the kitchen up, we waited to retile.
In an untenable situation, you take a picture partly because you don't believe you were there. You take it because you know you'll never again be who you were then, and you know it's gonna be hard to grasp if you survive it.

The girl who would become "leash girl" was trained by her domineering boyfriend to grin at a camera with a thumbs up sign. This was a sweet country girl who joined up at seventeen with enormous pride. Living in the prison's fowl conditions, she'd probably started to do lots of things automatically. Smile, the beau would say, and she'd make thumbs up. Over and over and over. So they're dragging a recalcitrant-to-the-point-of-being-dead-weight prisoner (aka Gus) to interrogation, and the strap they fit over his shoulders slips because he's lifted his hands over his head like a diver, and part of it is around his neck, and the beau says Smile.

And she became a scapegoat for an American policy that attached the phrase unlawful combatant (translate: not worthy of Geneva Convention standards for POW internment) to the clothing of pretty much everybody in Abu Ghraib.

To read about these soldiers, even the most egregious one, is to think: raw damn deal. I have a hard time being civil on a packed subway when the AC fails. My piety about how I'd behave in a war zone is flimsy, no doubt contingent on the success of my city's infrastructure.

As Gourevitch also pointed out in one radio interview I heard, the journalist who covers the war is from a different class than the man who fights it, which breeds myriad opportunities for misunderstanding. In my neighborhood, everybody got drafted into Vietnam. They'd have certainly signed up after 9/11. Did we learn nothing about marginalizing those kids?

In Abu Ghraib, we didn't train them or give them a consistent guidebook--they had five versions and a lot of encouragement to improvise. We mortared them, fed them shit, kept them up all night, sent three thousand prisoners into a space fit for less than a tenth that. Then their senior officers praised how they stripped naked--as a matter of procedure--the suspected terrorists. In lieu of policies, the interrogation officers praised the initiative of the MPs for preparing the prisoners.

Can anybody tell me whey Rumsfeld and Bush, who had no plan for imprisoning the thousands picked up haven't faced any charges? Okay, okay, they weren't exactly there. But if I read right, not a single commissioned officer did time for what was standard operating procedure.

Michael Herr's Dispatches is the best war memoir I know, and I've taught classes at Syracuse University in the form for years. I'd like to close with a quote of Herr's that says more than I could on the subject of the difficult path between soldiers and the writers trying to capture truth while barraged with slippery appearances.

Was it possible they were there and not haunted? No, not possible, not a chance....I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet. Disgust doesn't begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before them. But disgust was only one color in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colors, there wasn't one color left out. I think that those people who used to say that they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn't squeeze out at least one for those men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them.

But of course we were intimate, I'll tell you how intimate: they were my guns, and I let them do it....I let them do that for me while I watched, maybe for them, maybe not. We covered each other, an exchange of services.....

Gourevitch has given us something newer and truer to cry about vis a vis Abu Ghraib.