Eat The Apple

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases cha... (more)

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war. (less)