I couldn’t get my hands on a copy of this book fast enough. Like Williams, I am a former military linguist — though I was never able to finagle my way into a war zone. Finally, a look into the world of war zone women with all the sexual and political drama that portends; a pas de deux with Swofford’s “Jarhead,” Uris’ “Battle Cry” and O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” If only it had been a smart memoir. Instead, we get a self-absorbed lost girl playing GI Jane dress-up. Focused on her year in Iraq from February 2003-04, “Love My Rifle” is a meditation on what it means to be in that 15 percent of the Army that is female and at war — its contradictions, its perks, its punishments, its absurdities and its epiphanies. Or, at least, it was meant to be, before Williams’ need for attention and approval smothered her insight. Still, in spite of herself, Williams provides a peephole, if not a window, onto the world of the woman warrior.

I want to feel for Williams, truly I do. The military is full of diamond-in-the-rough kids like her who might have made a few mistakes but still know that there are uncharted worlds inside them. They know they were destined for a polyester uniform; making a break for the GI’s outfit, rather than the burger flipper’s — or, God forbid, the inmate’s — is a daring demand to be taken seriously, to be invested in, to be challenged. To be seen. For poor or lost kids, joining up is an escape attempt, a prison break. Our all-volunteer military remains tenable only because these strivers somehow know that hot marches in the sun and nights spent sleeping in a foxhole will open the door to whatever’s buried inside their dreams.

But for the can-do pragmatism of the draftless military, the world would have happily consigned these nondescript kids to Folsom — or Molson’s. The military’s is a complicated psyche; for young people like Williams, there is relief and gratitude at finding a home, but there’s also anger — See what a drastic step I had to take to get a break! (Perhaps that explains the average GI’s “fuck you” conservatism. I made something from nothing, they think; screw you if you choose not to.) On the one hand, the lost kids just want to be left alone to do the fulfilling and secure jobs they’d bootstrapped themselves into. On the other, they want someone to notice how smart, how dedicated, how innovative under fire they are, even though Mom didn’t go to Choate and Pvt. Laquita Jones was never getting to Europe except by C-130. People join up to find out what they’re made of, and one of the precious few compelling arcs in Williams’ memoir is her rumination on her risk taking. Then there’s the other 98 percent of the book.

Williams may have been a good soldier, but she should reconsider her plan to become a journalist. Hell, she’s not even a good buddy, the bedrock of GI mutual respect. Hey, all you infantry grunts who kept Williams’ linguist ass alive, here’s what she thinks of you:

“[They] would always tell me: ‘You’re really smart. You’re smarter than we are.’

And I’d give them credit, too. I would tell them: ‘Sure, I’ve read more books than you guys. I can speak Arabic. But I couldn’t fix my truck if my life depends on it. I know nothing about engines. I would never be able to understand your equipment. You are all smarter than I am about how to make things work.’

Being around these guys and military personnel in general had given me a whole new appreciation for non-intellectual skills. These were people with manual skills. They knew how to use their hands. They were not afraid to get sweaty or dirty. And I respected them for that.” (Emphasis added.)

First of all, there isn’t a grunt in the world dumb enough not to have heard that for the insult it was and to have suggested that Williams kiss his “non-intellectual” ass as he went off to inform his buds what a loser their 98 Golf (linguist) is. (Swofford, the far superior GI writer here, was a grunt, by the way.) During my six years enlisted in the Air Force, I don’t recall having had many GIs kiss my ass for being the smart, well-read linguist that I was — unless they were trying to get me naked. Most likely, they were thinking A) you got no idea what I do with my free time, and B) you might be able to order beer in Korean, but I keep Eagles (F-15s) flying!

GIs have sturdy, well-fortified egos, both because their bosses regularly, quite consciously, pat them on the back and because their jobs are extremely specialized, especially their pecking orders. Most often, it was officers, who are sort of like parents to the junior enlisted, who sang the praises of GIs. Having learned the significance of this praise while I was enlisted, I made sure to dole out plenty of it during my six years commissioned. It was my duty, but more than that, I had the good fortune to supervise people too well-raised and too well-adjusted to fish this shamelessly for approval. All of that is to say, this memoir isn’t really about being young and female in the Army. It’s about being young and insecure in the world. It’s about being an immature, needy woman who learned all the wrong lessons while at war.

Indeed, “Love My Rifle” contains enough score settling, petty rants against officers and rank insubordination that I wish Williams could be retroactively subjected to a good old-fashioned GI “blanket party” and then thrown in the brig. She is the garden-variety “barracks rat” malcontent who seethes when the new ranking NCO (non-commissioned officer) has the gall to inspect her new domain and whom Williams childishly dismisses as “technically in charge.” No, she was actually in charge. Good Lord, how I loathed those women who wanted to have the only pair around, wafting prettily on a cloud of estrogen while easily led men did all their work for them.

The challenge for any memoirist is to tell the readers how wonderful and interesting she, this person they’ve never heard of, is; the trick — and this is key — is to do it without making them roll their eyes and hate you. But just when you think she might trip up and captivate, Williams gets in her own way: “Leaving town has tended to be my way of ending relationships…” — Stop, Kayla! Stop right there. But no — “that I otherwise had no idea how to end.” Williams writes like drunks walk.

Page after page after page, Williams always goes a phrase or a sentence too far, capping off yet another cluster bomb of self-congratulation (“So I graduated from high school at 16 and went directly to college”), preening (“I started French lessons when I was really young, and mom [took me to France]. Awesome experiences”), mastery of the obvious (“Quinn was the only member of my team with whom I could actually be vulnerable … And now he was going. So I knew I would miss him”) and the kind of bad writing and neediness that just whittles your brain down to a blunt nub.

But even Williams can’t entirely ruin the story of a woman at war, hard as she tries. Here’s a nice bit: “You’re messing with me, I said, feeling messed with.” One of a few redeeming sections is about traveling in convoys in Iraq, given the relentless danger from roadside bombs and snipers. Even a linguist who claims to read a book a day has to man a weapon and make split-second decisions about whether or not to fire. She builds the suspense of the patrols and captures the surreality of a world at war. She writes:

“Just then a passenger on my side turns to look for the first time. It’s a little boy. Not more than eight or nine years old. I’m pointing my weapon at a boy who looks exactly like [a former Arab boyfriend's] brother. The boy looks at me looking at him. I lower my rifle and hold it with one hand across my knees. Without thinking, I wave at the boy with my other hand. And after a moment, he waves back.”

Still, Williams quickly loses her focus, switching from recounting the woman’s experience of war to concentrating on her petty battles with her superiors, and frustrates the reader again and again as she tries to understand what Iraq was and is like for Western women. “Apparently,” she writes, “Iraqis asked our guys if we were prostitutes. Employed by the U.S. military to service the troops in the same way the Russian army managed sex for its soldiers in Kosovo. I didn’t want anyone to think we were the U.S. equivalent of that!”

While the banality of Williams’ insights is what arrested my attention here, once stopped, I began to wonder why the budding journalist already at work on a memoir didn’t interrogate this rather compelling notion. During my two years in Korea, we all heard about the many rich Korean men who offered blond GIs hundreds — no, thousands — of dollars for just one night of sex. But it was always the “friend of a friend” or a “friend who’d just rotated back to the world” that it had happened to. Why not track down one of these guys and find out exactly what the Iraqis said? Did any Iraqi men make lewd suggestions to Williams? Ogle her? Offer her money? She recounts many encounters with Iraqi locals, often when she was the only female GI around, with not one liberty taken, not one suggestion that they thought her a ho. It never occurs to Williams that this was much more about good, old-fashioned American misogyny than anything else. While it’s entirely likely that Iraqis assume most Western women are of “easy virtue” (they get MTV, after all), a complicated phenomenon like the Middle Easterner’s attitude toward Western women deserves much better treatment from someone with firsthand knowledge.

As good as Williams gets comes early on when she’s describing the “Queen for a Year” phenomenon; the farther men are from home, and the fewer women there are, plain Jane soldiers begin to morph into supermodels. Williams admits taking advantage of her gender to get out of yucky chores and being inconsistent in her reaction to the men’s constant scrutiny:

“A woman soldier has to toughen herself up. Not just for the enemy, for battle, or for death. I mean to toughen herself to spend months awash in a sea of nervy, hyped-up guys who, when they’re not thinking about getting killed, are thinking about getting laid. Their eyes on you all the time, your breasts, your ass — like there is nothing else to watch, no sun, no river, no desert, no mortars at night.

“Still, it’s more complicated than that. Because at the same time you soften yourself up. Their eyes, their hunger: yes, it’s shaming — but they also make you special. I don’t like to say it — it cuts you inside — but the attention, the admiration, the need: they make you powerful. If you’re a woman in the army, it doesn’t matter so much about your looks. What counts is that you are female.

“Wartime makes it worse. There’s the killing on the streets, the bombs at the checkpoints — and the combat in the tents. Some women sleep around; lots of sex with lots of guys, in sleeping bags, in trucks, in sand, in America, in Iraq. Some women hold themselves back; they avoid sex like it’s some weapon of mass destruction. I know about both.

“And I know about something else. How these same guys you want to piss on become your guys. Another girl enters your tent, and they look at her the way they looked at you, and what drove you crazy with anger suddenly drives you crazy with jealousy. They’re yours. Fuck, you left your husband to be with them, you walked out on him for them. These guys, they’re your husband, they’re your father, your brother, your lover — your life.”

We were robbed. When you see what Williams is capable of when she’s not in her own way it’s hard to forgive her for the book she ended up writing.

To be sure, the memoirist plays a dangerous game. Unless something spectacular happened to you (like being held hostage, say), it isn’t possible to pen such a book without being narcissistic and convinced of one’s own special wonderfulness. So, the problem isn’t that Williams is self-absorbed. It’s that her self-absorption penetrates no more than inch-deep into her own psyche and cringing need for attention and approval. The problem isn’t that she thinks she’s the shit; it’s that she provides no evidence of said shit-ness. I don’t even mind that she name-drops Chomsky, Zinn and the Dead Kennedys in one tiny paragraph to bludgeon us with how eclectic and well-read she is; I mind having to deal with a poser whose poses are so amateurish. Most of all, I mind that, given the dearth of women’s writing on this subject, I still have to demand that you read this book and fill in the gaps for yourself. Still, beware: This isn’t a memoir about being female in the Army. It’s about still being lost in the world.

But it was the montage of naked women cascading jubilantly into the rogues’ beds, poufy bridesmaid dresses crumpled somewhere out of frame, that did the most for me. The sight of them — alone, unarmed and unafraid, as one military motto goes — was as deliciously sexy and just as much fun as the shenanigans at the weddings where Wilson and Vaughn wooed their willing prey. It was fitting, not to mention gutsy in these WWJD days, that this part continued to be set unapologetically to “Shout” and not some gauzy, romantic cop-out guck so we could forgive these sluts for schtupping a man they’d just met. “Crashers,” at least in the beginning, wasn’t about love. It was about making multi-orgasmic lemonade on love’s fringes until it was your turn to star in a wedding.

That montage was a celebration of sex, carnality and the feminine ideal. It was a testament to the lion-tamer aspect of being a straight chick, that heady “bring a strong man to his knees” adrenaline rush that is one of the keys to understanding your power as a woman. At the same time it’s a testament to the pleasures of surrender, that sweet, sweet payoff that can only come after a free-fall shuddering toward a landing site that has been promised but not verified, you tramp. That happy Vesuvius of perky breasts, firm thighs and concave tummies was a tribute to youth, to the search for adventure and to our enduring belief in romantic serendipity. It was a bungee jump with an elastic cord you’re pretty sure is functional, but hey, if it’s not, your wounds will heal. It was about optimism and thrill-seeking and I was proud of those sluts. They leapt before they looked and I don’t want to know anyone who never has.

But, somehow, by the end of the parade of weddings crashed and women laid, I realized I was sad. It took me an entire martini to figure out why: The crashers seduced their way through every culture and every ethnicity but mine. Why don’t Owen and Vince want to seduce me, too? Why don’t they want to dance with my nana at a wedding?

It’s confusing to me that in a nation, a world, where black culture so permeates, if not dominates, the entertainment industry that a major Hollywood release would throw up its hands and declare Negro culture impenetrable. There isn’t a white boy in America who doesn’t do a jerky cabbage patch when he’s happy and pronounce himself “dissed” when angry, yet Hollywood can’t break the code on LaQuisha and Raheem jumping the broom? Odd that “Shout,” performed by black musicians, was chosen as the raucous anthem for an ode to collapsing racial and ethnic borders but excludes blacks, the lubricant by which this celebration of humanity, this transcendence of race, proceeds. More troubling, could it be that achieving racial harmony results from non-blacks banding together to exclude blacks? (If this seems extreme, check out David Roediger’s excellent new work, “Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White.” He discusses the extent to which joining in pogroms against blacks helped the despised Southern and Eastern European immigrants “prove” their whiteness and become Americanized.) We can provide the soundtrack, we can entertain, but we cannot participate; where have we heard that before? Whites can dance the hora, they can play mah-jongg with Chinese grannies, they can go Bollywood with the Hindus, but they can’t figure out the electric slide? (That’s our wedding staple, by the way. I have yet to hear “Shout” at a black wedding.) I reject most conspiracy theories, really I do, but I suspect that black culture was, however subconsciously, deemed unworthy.

Please don’t misunderstand. I hate those Negroes who would bean count for black faces in Antarctica so they can get airtime whining about “the lack of diversity” blah blah. Start a school! Take in some foster kids! Run for office! If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, cheap race-mongering is the last refuge of an idiot. “Niggardly,” indeed. Anytime you want someone with a ghetto pass to tell them to shut up for you, give a sister a call. I’m talking about something else, something more than “gotcha, white folks,” something y’all won’t be able to dismiss as easily as all that. I’m talking about something that grieves black women, that breaks our hearts so much I have never had a conversation with another black woman about it. Or, at least not one that dared venture further than “I bet he’s got a white girl” as a gorgeous brother passed by. Our hearts are broken because we are unloved. More than that: Black women are unlovable, or so the world tells us every day. Most often, it’s a sucker punch.

Minding my own business recently, I was reading my friend’s excellent nonfiction book, “Random Family: Love, Sex and Trouble in the Bronx,” which chronicles the intersected lives of a hardscrabble constellation of Latinas. In lamenting the loss of a lover to a rival, one woman was dumbfounded that anyone would prefer a woman “with hair like a black girl’s” to her. I am ugly by definition. Usually, though, our degendering and masculinization is pretty easy to see coming. I watch the promos for my hero Chris Rock’s new series about his Bed-Stuy adolescence and cringe when his “mother” traumatizes her son with bellowed, emasculating, dehumanizing threats like: “Boy, I will SLAP yo’ name out the phone book, then call Ma Bell and tell her I did it.” Hilarious, no? He looks about 10 as she terrorizes him with psychotic threats that would make Uday and Qusay proud. Who would want to bed that shrieking harridan? Who’d want to live next door to or hire such a bitch? Bets are off on how far into the series it will be before this black harpy (how redundant) is swiveling her neck and reducing a good man to shreds with her razor tongue. I have a 4-year-old son and an almost 2-year-old daughter who would go into cardiac arrest if I spoke to them that way, even in jest. Forgive me, Chris, but your “mother” proves that Zora Neale Hurston nailed it when she noted that black women are “the mules of the world.”

She was speaking of how hard most of our lives were in the 1920s and 1930s, she was talking about the patriarchy and misogyny within the black community that keeps so many of us mute chambermaids who are regularly beaten, but perhaps most important, she was talking about what that hardness did to us, or rather, to others in dealing with us. Our ability to survive atrocity, to make something from nothing, to bounce back day after day — somehow, this makes the world see us as rhino-skinned, never soft. Quadruple-lunged, never asthmatic. Incapable of giggling, blushing or shutting the hell up. Sisters are essentialized as indefatigable, never in need of a door held open, a chair pulled out. A “how are you doing, really?” I have to believe that somewhere in there is also the belief that the niceties are wasted on us, coarse cows that we are. Bears are happy shitting in the woods and “sistaz” ain’t got no time for no nonsense like sweet talk, a man who rises when we do, or a lover to whisper naughty things to in the dark. And we don’t need no stinking flowers either, or at least Jamie Foxx’s hospitalized mother didn’t; in “Collateral,” she rejected them and belittled him for his foolishness. The bedraggled dandelions I got for Mother’s Day this year will shrivel up and blow away before I’ll part with them.

Owen, Vince: We long for those things. It’s a misery to black woman why our strength, the strength that kept our people from extinction and which holds the community together yet, makes us seem manly somehow, as if no white woman has ever roughened her pink hands or survived rape for her family’s sake. Or been a bitch. Why is it so hard to fathom that we can raise our children alone (if need be, rarely by preference), work two jobs and still look good in a miniskirt. Still want to look good in a miniskirt. Sisters are simply not seen as either ladylike or, to put it bluntly, fuckable. Rapeable, certainly, as the history of slavery and Jim Crow prove, just not fuckable.

I realized this in the 1980s and ’90s when, because of my career choices, I was usually the only woman and only black around. I’d say nothing as my office mates, the men I partied with and who backed me to the hilt professionally, would grouse about the lack of women. I was smarter and better-looking than they were. I was, to take a page from my plain-spoken Vince, hot. I wore uncomfortably tight clothing. Makeup and sheer pantyhose. Nail polish. Jane Fonda for daaaaays. My heels were so legendary, my nickname was Spike. Oh, Debra dressed shamefully in the summertime. But to most white men, to the men who occupied the world that my life choices drew me to, I was invisible. When I finally married at 40, it was to the first man who’d asked me out in five years. I had been holding out for a brother but, realizing that was even less likely to happen, finally let that go.

Even when I was a seven-months-pregnant behemoth, I was invisible as I hefted a load of packages to the post office at Christmastime, as I struggled with a pallet of sodas at Costco. I was even invisible in the Tiny Tim confines of the modern airplane. I could hear crickets as I struggled to get my bag into the overhead. Two seats away, an elderly white lady was swarmed by white men helping her with hers. They politely excused themselves as they tried to hurry past my bulk to her. It was all I could do not to cry. I did cry the time two white men “erased” me in a shoebox-size Dunkin Donuts in Logan Airport. One had filled the tiny room with his luggage, his restless kids and a complicated order. I waited politely in line behind him. As he was trying to get organized, he noticed the white man in line behind me and apologized profusely for holding him up. Then he waved him gallantly on to the cashier. White man No. 2 had to step over my luggage to reach the counter. However racist white men may be, a nice rack should be the great neutralizer in an encounter that will only last a minute. You have to give racism its props; it’s the only force proven to trump what a hound dog the average man is.

In the ’80s and ’90s, I reacted to my sexual invisibility vis-à-vis white men with faux feminist sarcasm and wannabe black nationalist contempt. But I’m 46 now and far less full of bullshit. I’m not angry. I’m hurt. It’s not that I want white men to want me. I want all men to want me. I want to be seen as desirable, if I actually am. As available, if I actually am. As fuckable, though you should be so lucky. But, because I’m black, I’m somehow seen as a gender crasher, an imposter fronting as a real woman. Liable to get the sexual bum’s rush at any moment. No wonder so many of us are bitches. It protects us from rejection if we make it impossible to get anywhere near us in the first place.

Sitting there in the dark, halfway through the “Wedding Crashers” montage, I realized that I was jealous of those girls just setting out in life and thought I was getting over it. I had made the most of my youth; it was someone else’s turn now. I went all Mother Earthy and wise and found myself watching them with something like a maternal respect and approval, like lagging back a pace so my daughter could take her first steps or cheering as she hit her first home run. I was passing the torch, one risk-taking hottie to another. Or so I thought. In the end, all I was allowed to do was watch how “real women” live. Every woman will be able to picture herself in that parade of female pleasure, female power and eternal youth. Every woman but the black ones.

A basically sweet, silly movie has me, late in life, reconsidering my impatience with nitnoy black separatism — black dorms, Miss Black America pageants, “The Wiz.” I still believe that true separatism is not a viable option for a group comprising only 13 percent of the population, but perhaps a psychological one may well be required to maintain our mental health. As with OJ and Michael Jackson, white folks have turned on me when I’ve been among the most “assimilated” of Negroes, and I went slinking back to the hood. I’ve been soothing myself, post-”Crashers,” with marathon sessions of the Soul Food compilation. What a relief. What a refuge. In that parallel universe, that majority-black fantasy land, sisters can be mere women, just women, any woman. Ones with “hair like a black girl’s” or ones with weaves. Light, bright, damn near white, chocolate and everything in between. Straight. Gay. Working-class and multimillionaire. Godless and God-fearing. Bitchy and sweet. All different, all little concerned with white folks, all getting laid since the brothers there (unlike in the real world) can’t take their eyes off us.

For us mules of the world, it’s too bad that world doesn’t exist either.

It was clear to me that black people chose not to work very hard in the military. Why else would so few number among the linguists, the commandos, the pilots, the officers, the academy grads? You couldn’t enter a military administrative office without finding enough Negroes working there to make a Tarzan movie and it always embarrassed me. I expressed my embarrassment as annoyance. That’s their choice, I thought; they might just as easily have chosen a more challenging field, but they’d rather simply take up space.

I was embarrassed to be one of so few linguists and I was embarrassed by the sharecropper intonations and low-class lack of home training I so frequently encountered among these “typing Negroes.” I hated entering admin offices when I was junior enlisted because the blacks there tended to be my peers, by rank and age group, and there was an assumption of familiarity that made me uncomfortable. I was sure they’d want to “talk black,” make fun of whites, scoff at the Air Force. Then there were the liberties black males felt free to take with me. Sotto voce, they called me “baby” and wanted to know when they were going to get “some of that sugar.” When I refused to respond to their vulgarities, I was menacingly called “sister,” a word often used to extract behavioral concessions from someone you hope will be too afraid of group disapproval not to back down. It means: “Don’t forget you’re black; act right or I’ll call you a Tom.” I got called “Tom” a lot.

As few as we were, the “Head Negroes” (self-designated arbiters of all things sufficiently or insufficiently black) tried every form of negative reinforcement to make us behave. There’s a Head Negro anywhere there are African-Americans. At the Defense Language Institute in 1981, she and I began as close friends. How could we not have been? We were both working-class black girls from north St. Louis. She was much harder-edged than me and came from a much less stable home, but still, we knew the same schools, same neighborhoods, same churches, same rib joints. We’d even graduated basic on the same day. Later Martha, who was white and one of eight children of very religious Catholics, came along and we three were inseparable. But as Martha and I grew closer (through our shared love of books and traditional upbringings) and the two of us began to spend more time together, the Head Negro expressed her hurt as racial pride. Black people weren’t good enough for me. Ironically, that was true except that she was smart enough, as a Romanian linguist, to make my grade. She just wanted to act so black: she wasn’t shooting for DG, she mocked me for shooting for it and she was blasi about the Air Force. She went out of her way to cultivate every black she could find at DLI. She thought she’d hit the Negro mother lode when she networked her way into Fort Ord, the Army base not so far away (not far away enough for me). The Army is a third black, and on top of that, Fort Ord is an infantry base, i.e., full of ghetto blacks. Head Negro homed in on every one she could find who was just marking time, lugging a rifle and a fifty-pound rucksack. Unless the Mafia starts hiring, I used to sneer, what were they going to do next? She was trying to re-create north St. Louis and I was trying to exorcise it. She was determined to remain the ghetto girl I was desperate to bury.

— From “An American Story” by Debra Dickerson. © 2000 Debra Dickerson. Used by permission, all rights reserved

BACK TO THE SALON BOOK AWARDS 2000

Given the book’s commendable grasp, the only remaining question is how Evanzz could withstand the mudslide of murder, incest and stupidity facing anyone who tries to make sense of this mishmash religion that, for all its incoherent hatred, has brought 4 million black Americans to (something like) Islam. Reading about the weak, lethal and fanatically anti-intellectual leaders of the NOI made me want to wash my mind out with soap. This all goes double, of course, for the government counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) agents who worked so hard from as early as the 1940s to foment both political and actual fratricide among black activists, from the NOI’s chaotic prototypes to the saintly (though libidinous) Martin Luther King and on to the nihilistic Elijah Muhammad himself. Few emerge from this sordid tale deserving to hold their heads up.

Those who know something about the Nation of Islam will not be surprised to read about the venality, hypocrisy, cowardice and megalomania exhibited by its main players — Muhammad, along with Wallace D. Fard, Louis Farrakhan and various henchmen and competitors. Evanzz does deliver something of a surprise, though: Cast in the proper historical, cultural and international contexts, the emergence of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam seems slightly less ridiculous — but only slightly.

“The Messenger” is really the story of what happens after a great evil ends. It’s the story of America’s racial chickens coming home to roost. After reading this book, any group in power thinking of oppressing another group will know the enraged and gibbering fiend they’d be loosing on their grandchildren.

Developed roughly between 1930 and 1940, the Nation’s “theology” is difficult to follow. This is largely because, in that first generation after the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation had finally crumbled to dust, the movement’s doctrine was made up as needed by whatever flimflam artist was proclaiming himself to be Allah that day. During this period it was clear that whites felt little anguish over their past actions toward blacks and had no intention of living peacefully and equitably with their former property. Reasonable black folks were disappointed but hopeful. Unreasonable ones were looking for revenge.

“The Messenger” is, then, the story of a life dedicated to exploiting the misery of his people for his own personal gain. Elijah, of course, was only one in a long line of con men (not all of whom were black) to recognize the hunger for release from the chronically low self-esteem and self-hatred under which many black Americans labored. The quick way out and up is to learn to hate someone else.

Muhammad, backed by a goon squad that Attila the Hun would have looked on fondly, taught a great many black people to hate and call it a religion. Given the sorry outlines of his tale, the book is most interesting as a work of history rather than the story of an individual life. Evanzz does two things that few others have dared: He deals directly with the tension between the black bourgeoisie and the lower classes of blacks in the freedom struggle, and he confronts squarely some radical blacks’ outright collusion with the enemy during World War II.

Before he was “The Messenger” and a self-proclaimed divinity, Elijah Poole was a sharecropping preacher’s son with a fourth-grade education, a drinking problem, a mind made gullible by suffering and a need to feel special. Born in 1897 in Sandersville, Ga., the seventh of 13 children, Poole had a childhood demarcated by his father’s terrifying sermons, set against an atmosphere of Klan terror, lynchings (including a friend’s), disenfranchisement and cotton-picking peonage. The young Poole read about caged Pygmies at the World’s Fair and the Bronx Zoo. The wonder is that more black Americans didn’t go the way of madness and race hatred.

In 1923, Elijah, by then a husband and father of two, had fled Georgia for Detroit, where he worked steadily but remained discontented, especially with the pie-in-the-sky aspects of Christianity. He drifted into black nationalist groups like Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey gave voice to the frustration many lower-class blacks had harbored silently in their hearts: They were subservient not only to whites but also to lighter-skinned, well-educated, NAACP-member, linen-napkin Negroes. But here was the chocolate-brown, self-made Garvey dismissing fancy black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and Roy Wilkins as “‘blue-veined’ mulattoes who were too wedded to integration to solve the problems of Africans of the diaspora.” “Diaspora” — now there’s a word a Georgia field hand had probably never heard before. The concept elevated Poole’s own plight from one of personal failing to part and parcel of what he saw as an unfolding international conspiracy.

For their part, mainstream bourgeois blacks condemned Garvey as much for his dark skin as for his politics and applauded when the whites convicted him of mail fraud, only too happy to see him brought low. This theme — the black bourgeoisie vs. the Negroid, uneducated field hands of black activism — was continued throughout the civil rights movement, though it was rarely discussed.

It’s striking that it was the working-class, often darker-skinned leaders who stressed the international context for black Americans’ oppression, while middle-class blacks rarely did. Having no alternative and no reason not to, the former identified with the dark-skinned of the world, while the latter wanted the respect of and a closer relationship with American whites.

Portentously, and no doubt frighteningly to whites, bourgeois blacks and the U.S. government, UNIA’s first international convention in New York in 1922 drew representatives from 25 countries, many of which the U.S. government considered enemies. The Nation of Islam would continue to expand this internationalist drive, much to the consternation of both the U.S. government and mainstream civil rights leaders. Years later, the Nation may have wanted Malcolm X dead because he told the truth on the Messenger, but the Man wanted him dead because not only was he effective domestically, but he was hooked up with undesirable Arab and African leaders.

While it was maddening for whites to demand good citizenship of those they legally considered to be less than citizens, one may legitimately ask exactly how America should have responded to movements like Garvey’s and, later, Muhammad’s and Malcolm’s. While it was unfair to oppress blacks and call them traitors for looking for international assistance, the government still had a natural impulse to protect itself from foreigners who claim to hate the U.S.

Garvey preached a new nation in Africa for African-Americans, which he called the United States of Africa. His words rang in Elijah’s ears after a day of insults and the assembly line: “Where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and kingdom? Where is his president, his country and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?”

It certainly wasn’t in America, at least not for Garvey. Elijah, on the other hand, didn’t want to relocate. He began to dream, and later to preach, of the white man’s impending extinction, his self-implosion through an overload of evil. (Then as now, Muhammad’s followers took in stride the ever-slipping deadlines for the death of the white man.) When the white man was extinct, the black man would rule without having to change addresses. To bring closer that day of black men dancing on white men’s graves, Elijah worked actively to undermine and overthrow the U.S. government and encouraged his followers to do the same.

The lessons that both white and black America taught Marcus Garvey made a big impression on Elijah Muhammad. Garvey served five years for mail fraud and was deported back to Jamaica, discredited. He blamed not white America but his “opponents of the colored race” for his downfall. “They are light-colored Negroes who think that the Negro can always develop in this country. They also resent the fact that I, a black Negro, am a leader.”

In 1959, Thurgood Marshall, the embodiment of the black bourgeoisie and mainstream movement work, would dis the Black Muslims as “run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by Nasser or some Arab group.” Can anyone fail to see why the black working class jumped on the chance to get out from under the thumb of the “blue-veined mulattoes”? Marshall, of all people, should have known that lots of those black folks in jails were guilty of little more than the quest to survive.

The glancing light Evanzz casts on black informants and double agents is another fascinating aspect of his book. When an enraged Hoover made the destruction of Elijah Muhammad a top priority — as he had done with Garvey — the FBI had no trouble recruiting moles to funnel information out and disinformation in. Far more Americans, black and white, approved of Martin Luther King, but even so, Evanzz reports that 3,000 black and Hispanic agents were recruited to wreak havoc in King’s planned 1968 Washington Spring Project. Who were these agents?

From the ’20s through the ’40s there was intense political turmoil in the black community — much of which did not involve the mainstream civil rights movement and direct opposition to white racism. Evanzz is to be praised for bringing to light an aspect of black history that many blacks likely want to forget: collusion with the Japanese on the eve of World War II, and conscientious objection based on opposition not to war itself but to fighting for “the white man.” Elijah traveled the country giving pro-Japanese sermons and exulted in the carnage at Pearl Harbor primarily because he believed it when the Japanese promised blacks “nice homes on islands near the United States” in exchange for their assistance. It is also possible that the Japanese gave him money. Elijah so hated America, he wouldn’t even allow his followers to vote.

While he’s not a strong writer, Evanzz is a stellar researcher, and no one interested in understanding black America — or in critiquing it — can skip this book. But if the only discussion it engenders is a warmed-over debate over the merits of nonviolent and violent protest, we will have wasted a golden opportunity to address more complex issues, like patriotism in the face of oppression, and repressive, exploitative hierarchies within the black community. It’s easy to talk about what the white man has done to blacks. The time has come for blacks to talk about what they’ve done to each other.

From 1980 to 1992, I was on active duty in the United States Air Force. My last overseas assignment was as chief of intelligence for Ankara Air Station, Turkey, a NATO-affiliated base. I got there in June 1989. When I left in late 1990, we were at war with our wacky neighbor to the south, Iraq. I rotated back to the world, and the Pentagon, and remained involved in the war effort till its conclusion. The war affected me in ways that I would never have predicted and have yet to effectively communicate to civilians and the unreconstructed liberals who expect me to be conflicted over my involvement.

I’m not. In fact, I tried hard to be even more directly involved. I volunteered to go to Saudi Arabia (in unsentimental G.I.-speak, “the Sandbox”), from which our troops were staging. I saluted smartly when I was deemed crucial and had to remain on active duty an extra year through the war’s aftermath. Indeed, I sought out every opportunity to be heard on operational matters (read: I put my two cents in every chance I got on exactly how I thought the destruction of the enemy should proceed). My only regret is that I wasn’t allowed hands-on participation or a more direct role in the decision-making that put “bombs on target.”

I’m not bloodthirsty. I can’t watch horror movies, people yelling at each other or a hypodermic needle piercing flesh. You cry, I cry. You puke, I puke. I’ll walk away from a fight so fast you’d get dizzy. I only enlisted in the first place to get out of my neighborhood. No one was more shocked than I when I turned into Xena: Warrior Princess at the Gulf War’s commencement. But I think I’ve figured out why I responded the way I did and why I wanted to get to the war zone.

Here’s the reason that will disgust you: I was professionally curious to see if all the things we’d been simulating for so long would actually work. It’s not as if, for instance, we could nonchalantly jam, say, Ecuador’s communications one morning just to see if we were doing it right. Now, here was our chance. How much could we destroy with how little? You never know when you might run low on weapons, and a good officer plans ahead. How many could we really kill if we dropped this kind of bomb as opposed to that kind? Oh wait — a few are getting away. Let’s chase them down with something low and slow and see if we can’t pick them off. Got em! Good job. Let’s see what kinda damage those F-16s can really do when our pilots aren’t just “shooting” gun cameras, photo op’ing what they would have destroyed had they not been shooting wussy blanks. Now we could blow those suckers up and see how good we’d gotten at body counting since ‘Nam.

- – - – - – - – - -

After a decade of scurrying into chem gear while inspectors held stopwatches, after an entire career spent simulating enemy attacks by wearing signs that said, “Left foot blown off” or “HQ building destroyed,” finally, we could put our skills to the test. Surgeons get to operate on real people with real appendicitis. Firemen get to battle real blazes and save real people from danger. But G.I.s with operational specialties rarely get to employ their skills. So, yes, we took professional pride in our work. We certainly didn’t exult in the carnage (had anyone, he or she would have been sternly reprimanded and shunned). But neither were we squeamish about it. The duly elected commander in chief said, “Jump!” and we said, “How high, sir?” (I wouldn’t dare speak for those directly engaged in battle. I’ll never know how it feels to actually kill someone or to blow up a building with humans in it. I’m only speaking as one who helped direct the war effort generally.)

Here’s the more understandable, forgivable reason for my militancy: guilt. Ten days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, I had a team of 10 in place in Saudi Arabia, quartered in the same barracks that would later be blown up (none of my people were hurt). I’d gone to Turkey from Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio: The team was drawn from the same people I’d just spent three years working and partying with. The team Leader, Capt. Annie Ganzy, had an infant less than 6 months old as well as a civilian husband and other children. We were girlfriends. For some reason, she came to symbolize all of them for me. I supposed that had I not known them, I wouldn’t have been so emotionally involved, but I did know them and I couldn’t sleep at night for fear that they’d be killed or disabled.

Not one of them complained about having been sent. Indeed, nearly everyone had volunteered and basically begrudged the team their places of honor in the war zone. Since they were there working for my programs, I was responsible for them. There was a level of command between us, but my being above them in that chain meant the buck stopped with me. In my whole life I never experienced such a sobering slap in the face of responsibility. What if they died? What if they were taken prisoner? What if the women were raped by enemy soldiers? What about torture? What if I made a mistake? What if they died? What if I made a mistake? What if they died?

It tormented me. It was me their families should hold accountable. Me who should have to put on my dress uniform and take the long walk up 10 driveways to inform families that their son, daughter, mother, father would never come home again. I was bedeviled in a way that I pray never to be again in my life. The only thing I could think to do was to volunteer to go myself, so that’s what I did. I didn’t think I should send them there without being willing to go myself. I was scared shitless the Air Force would actually send me to the war, but at least, finally, I was able to sleep again. I was able to live with the responsibility.

That sense of responsibility, of my duty to my team, was never far from my mind. It kept me, it kept all of us, focused to a pinpoint on the war effort. I never stood a chance of getting to the war zone because nearly everyone volunteered, I was told. (Besides, it just doesn’t work that way. I know, I know, Maj. Houlihan was always putting in for those transfers on “M*A*S*H,” then withdrawing them at the last minute when Hawkeye apologized, but that’s just TV.) I had to try, though. There was too much at stake.

We G.I.s certainly knew that was a war about cheap oil — rhetoric about the poor, invaded Kuwaitis notwithstanding — but the fact remains that, for whatever reasons of geopolitical hegemony and petroleum reserves, Iraq was shooting at America. America is where my Mama lives. America is where all my stuff is. Iraq is going down. If Monaco shoots at us, for whatever reason, Monaco is going down. It’s that simple. And also, I had lots of friends both in the air and on the ground over there and it truly, truly pissed me off that somebody was trying to hurt folks I’d been drinking, flirting and shopping with. In my heart of hearts, I knew that if you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself: I wanted to help keep my team, my friends and all those anonymous captains just like me alive and in one piece. To do that, I needed to be in the game. For me, the Gulf War was about people, not politics. Saving my friends meant killing as many Iraqis and visiting as much well-chosen destruction upon them as possible so that they A) surrendered post haste and B) never pulled that shit again. I left it to President Bush to pretty up the details.

Of course, Saddam is a special kind of crazy, so B) will never happen until he’s in his solid gold mausoleum, but until then, I trust our G.I.s to kick ass, take names and make no apologies. Would I have been so unconflicted about Vietnam, Nicaragua or our Cold War activities in Africa? Probably not. As a matter of fact, during our Central America escapades in the 1980s, I steadfastly refused to volunteer for duties I suspected would send me on my way to Nicaragua; I thought our policies there disgusting. But I never kidded myself that I could be in the United States military and somehow morally opt out of a connection, however indirect, to that Central America policy. In for a penny, in for a pound. And make no mistake — had I ended up with orders for Central America somehow, I would either have gone and given it 110 percent or resigned my commission.

An apolitical, civilian-controlled military is the difference between us and the strongman juntas of South America and Africa. There’s a reason why we don’t have military coups here — G.I.s like me who kill who, when, how and for only as long as we’re told by the duly elected civilians to whom we remain firmly subservient at all times. If you don’t like what the duly elected civilians sent us off to do, throw the bums out next election. But you can’t simultaneously send us off to wage war and expect us to hate ourselves for it (we tried that once, remember?). Nor can you expect us to be half-assed about it — we’d have gotten ourselves and our buddies killed. What’s worse, we’d have let America be defeated. We didn’t enjoy the destruction, but we most definitely enjoyed the winning. We’re only human.