Fort Benning Blues by Mark Busby (review)

128 WAL 37.1 Spring 2002 with frogs” is being clear-cut, reminds us that “we can shape the histories we want to leave behind us” (62, 66). Lamenting the destruction of roosting habi­ tat in her native Maryland, Lisa Courtier’s “A Banishment of Crows” combines natural and personal history to elevate this oft-reviled bird to sacred and liter­ ary status, asking, “Why is it that we take for granted all but what we are about to lose?” (120). Further west, Trudy Dittmar’s meditation on winter and moose wagers, “The moose is as winter a creature as almost any” (19). Readers of western literature will find region and theme dramatized and challenged. Emma Brown’s “High Country,” chronicling the loss of a hiker in Wyoming, echoes one western sensibility, that “[t]o live fully, accepting the risk of . . . even death . . . is to be wild” (50). “Grizzly Bear,” Susan Marsh’s account of a man-eating Yellowstone grizzly, underscores this vision of the “wild” West, granting “[t]his was wilderness, complete with all its predators” (144). In “A Map for Hummingbirds,” Ellen Meloy asks, “What could be more Western than an endemic confusion of virtues?” (161). Her “reverse migra­ tion”— she summers in Utah, winters in Montana— illustrates the “rootlessness ” she ponders. She muses, “Everyone wants Montana to be not a state but a state of mind” (161). Anthologies, too, produce a state of mind. This collection will inspire general readers, teachers, students, and writers. Its two shortcomings are not the writers’. First, publication information following selections is sometimes incorrect. More egregiously, by closing the anthology with his own essay the editor risks upstaging what he seeks to foreground: women’s nature writing. Fort Benning Blues. By Mark Busby. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2001. 206 pages, $24.50. Reviewed by D arren DeFrain University of Wisconsin— Fox Valley Mark Busby has long been the director of the Center for Study of the Southwest at Southwest Texas State University and is perhaps best known to readers of western American literature for his books Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship and From Texas to the World and Back: Essays on theJourneys of Katherine Anne Porter. But with Fort Benning Blues, Busby tries on the hat of the first-time novelist. This is always a risky venture for an estab­ lished academic to undertake, especially with the added scrutiny that is sure to come with the sudden topicality (military training) of Busby’s first effort. Though Busby’s novel is not without its faults, the end result is an important, emo­ tionally charged, and gracefully executed debut. Unfortunately, detectable soft spots appear as early as the first act in Busby’s otherwise terrific novel. Jefferson Davis Adams is drafted and chooses U.S. Army Officer Candidate School (O CS) in large part because he hopes the pro­ gram will outlast the ongoing Vietnam War. Busby includes three whole pages Bo o k r e v i e w s 129 of an infantry fight song full of the overblown, jingoistic language his narrator is struggling against and leans too hard on well-worn song lyrics from Country Joe and the Fish as chapter epigraphs. He also peppers the prose with mean­ ingless intertextual references, like this one riffing on Henry Reed’s famous poem “Naming of Parts”: “In the classroom I continued to be distracted... .Yet the instructor droned on, naming the parts. ‘And here we have the upper sling swivel’” (40). But the novel soon moves beyond these flaws. Busby captures the intense (often intensely ridiculous) training regimen young Jeff Adams is subjected to. Both the nanator and the author clearly rec­ ognize the ludicrous nature of a school bent on feeding a failing war machine. Adams has entered into a secluded world, literally and figuratively, miles from his family and his home in Texas. His isolation is further intensified by the My Lai incident, something he only hears snatches of in his grandfather’s letters and glimpses in newspaper headlines at the fort. The world of Vietnam-Warera America keeps changing without him, and when the events of My Lai come to Fort Benning, in...