Eat the Apple is a catchy title, but what does it mean? According to a Jesuit colleague of mine who is a former U.S. Marine, to “eat the apple” means to take advantage of a situation. I thought perhaps it was a reference to Genesis and our ancestors’ exile from the Garden of Eden, the scene of the first sin. After all, the book takes place in Iraq, where ancient maps place Eden. More recent scholarship credits several war novels, where the tone is set by “Eat the apple, f— the Corps!” The saying, which goes back to 1973, comes from a Marine who is angry and fed up with the Marine Corps.

Eat the Apple

by Matt Young

Bloomsbury. 251p $24.99

Although my father was in the infantry in World War I, growing up during World War II my brother and I dreamed of becoming Marines. I can still sing “The Marines’ Hymn” and play it on the piano, though ROTC took me into the Army Artillery for two years in Germany. For this reason I found myself drawn to Matt Young’s Eat the Apple, the true story of a young recruit who takes on three deployments in Iraq over five years.

His structure is unusual, consisting of very short three to five page chapters, each presented in a different format: in the voice of a narrator describing another recruit, who represents Young himself; a dialogue between Young and a drill instructor; a dialogue between a boy and girl about marriage, ending with the boy saying, “I love you”; instructions on “how to ruin a life.” Young poisons his prose with constant uses of “f—,” often four or five per page, more than I have ever seen in a book, including war novels.

In the long run, Eat the Apple narrates Matt Young’s journey into himself.

There is a 20-panel comic strip about climbing a scatological mountain, and a five-page chapter on how to pack one’s equipment for travel, including all the tools necessary to facilitate masturbation. For laughs, the Marines joke endlessly about homosexuals, but when a fellow soldier says he is gay, they are ashamed for treating him disrespectfully. “He has been struggling and sinking in the desert sands for years alone and it is because of us,” Young writes. “We enfold him and defend him and love him like brothers.”

An odd chapter concerns a camp outside Fallujah popular with the ruling class, where kidnapped young girls were raped, murdered and thrown off the dock into the water where they would be devoured by giant black eels.

Because the war is mostly over by the time Young is deployed, his battle experiences are limited. Within three months of his arrival, however, a suicide bomber strikes a group of Humvees and a neighboring house near Amariya in Iraq. No one is killed except the bomber, but fourteen Marines are injured. Young recalls that Marines on the roof were taking cover from indirect fire. “We see ourselves, exploded bits smoking on the sand-turned-glass, impaled and shredded by window shards, crushed by falling rock. ‘What are the odds?’….We know we are going to die here too. Because of anger, retribution, oil, lies….We can hear the voices of the dead beckoning us. Who wants to take a bet on tomorrow?”

For Young, tomorrow’s enemy is a “sightless monster made up of sand flies with the mouth of a camel spider…. the husk house is a terrarium of horror; we are being eaten alive. Our feet and hands split and puss and crust, and sleep does not come. Time is all around us now, its passage unmarkable.”

From time to time Young enters the mind of a fellow Marine, a corporal who wishes he had been grievously wounded, just to break the routine. He worries that years from now he will still regret that he saw no fire fights, no ambushes. He still will not have killed another human being, only dogs. Will his fiancée be having sex with someone else? He will remember Blackwater Bridge, and recall the photograph of contractors burned and hung like meat on display from the green girders of the bridge.

From time to time in Eat the Apple, Matt Young enters the mind of a fellow Marine.

In the long run, this book narrates Young’s journey into himself. That he too has not killed anyone disturbs him, and he too falls into a subculture among the troops that cancels or overwhelms the virtue that would support his love for his fiancée waiting for him at home.

My own memory sends me back to Officers’ Basic Training at Fort Bliss, Tex., a prelude to my two years stationed in Germany before joining the Jesuits, when I was fed up with the behavior of my fellow lieutenants in Juarez, across the Mexican border. My father cautioned me against making judgments about my peers, because we would depend on one another in battle.

Young steadily stumbles into self-knowledge. He smokes and drinks too much; with the help of porn and street women he indulges in sex in many varieties. Toward the end he phones his own fiancée and calls off their wedding. In a final dialogue with his past, he has a nightmare where he is court-martialed for not doing enough to rescue a gunner when their truck was hit by a culvert bomb. He and his “Past-me” discuss the Iraq War and agree it was wrong. He asks his past self the definition of a hero. Answer: “Someone who acts selflessly in the face of adversity.”

Today, Matt Young teaches writing in Olympia, Wash. I hope he will not hesitate to tell his students that America’s wars can be wrong. It takes courage to say it, and to say it in clean speech.

This article appears in June 25 2018.

Son of Raymond A. Schroth, of Trenton, N. J., a World War I hero and editorial writer and reporter for the Trenton Times, Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald Tribune for over 40 years, and of Mildred (Murphy) Schroth, of Bordentown, N. J., a teacher in the Trenton public and Catholic school systems, Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., has spent his life as a Jesuit, journalist, and teacher.

After graduating from Fordham College in 1955--where he majored in American civilization, studied in Paris, and was editorial editor of the Fordham Ram--he served as an antiaircraft artillery officer in Germany for two years and joined the Society of Jesus in 1957. Ordained a priest in 1967, he obtained his PhD in American Thought and Culture at the George Washington University and taught journalism at Fordham until 1979. During that time he was also associate and book editor of Commonweal magazine.

After two years as academic dean of Rockhurst College in Kansas City, he became academic dean of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. In 1985-86 he held the Will and Ariel Durant Chair in the Humanities at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City. From 1986 to 1996 he taught journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans and was adviser to the Maroon, its award-winning newspaper. In 1995 the Southeast Journalism Conference named him Journalism Educator of the year. In 1996 he returned to Fordham as assistant dean of Fordham College Rose Hill and director of the Matteo Ricci Society, which prepares students to compete for prestigious fellowships. Meanwhile, from 1967 he served as a resident faculty member in the student residence halls.

He has published eight books, including: The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper (Greenwood); Books for Believers: 35 Books Every Catholic Should Read (Paulist); with Jeff Theilman, Volunteer: with the Poor in Peru (Paulist); and The American Journey of Eric Sevareid (Steerforth), a biography of the CBS commentator.

In 1999 he moved to Saint Peter's College, where he wrote two books: From Dante to Dead Man Walking: One Person's Journey through Great Religious Literature and Fordham: A History and Memoir, (Loyola Press in 2001-2002). In 2000 Saint Peter's College named him the Jesuit Community Professor in the Humanities. In Spring 2003 he was made editor of the national Jesuit university review, Conversations and will continue to serve in this position until 2013. His The American Jesuits: A History, (New York University Press, 2007), was followed by Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress, (Fordham University Press, 2010). He taught a graduate journalism course at NYU in 2004 and journalism history at Brooklyn College in 2006.

In recent summers he has traveled to Gabon, South Africa, Peru, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, France, Thailand, Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, and China to educate himself, write articles, and take pictures. In 2003 his National Catholic Reporter media essays won the Catholic Press Association's best cultural columnist award. His over 300 articles on politics, religion, the media, and literature have appeared in many publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review, Commonweal, America, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, Kansas City Star, Boston Globe and the Newark Star Ledger, where he was a weekly online columnist for several years. From time to time he lectures and appears on radio and TV. He is listed in Who's Who and Contemporary Authors. In his free time he swims, bikes, walks, reads, goes to movies and restaurants, and prays.