EAT THE APPLE

A Memoir

By Matt Young

251 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.

The trouble with writing the unvarnished truth in a memoir is that it requires you to be hard not only on others, but also on yourself.

Matt Young’s inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining “Eat the Apple” is that, but it is also a useful corrective to the current idealization of the American soldier — or in this case a Marine. Patriotism and respect for the military is so high in this country that we have lately held a national debate over whether professional athletes should be required to stand for the national anthem. Men and women in uniform are given preference in boarding airplanes, and are so routinely thanked for their service that the expression has become rote. Each new season brings a crop of movies and glossy TV serials dramatizing the heroics of our Special Operations.

Young sees hollowness and potential harm in this.

“Enforcing the idea that every service member is a hero is dangerous,” he writes. “Like creating a generation of veterans who believe everything they did was good.” Young warns of “creating an army of fanatics.”

Service deserves respect, of course, but it does not in itself guarantee stirring and selfless acts of bravery. Young is his own case in point. He sees his experience — three tours in Iraq — as far from heroic. He is at least as disturbed by his duty as he is proud of it. These contradictory feelings are a central theme in his book. Years removed, he both loathes and pines for the man he became in the Marine Corps. What he calls his “Past-me” was a reckless, selfish, cruel and dangerous man.