In the bloody afterbirth of Texas’s independence from Mexico, two generals scour the countrysides of their new Republic, visiting upon its rural villages; and like Pied Pipers, dressed in sharp uniforms (cleaned in a river just before entering the town to preserve an illusion of dignity and promise), riding sleek bay mares, they persuade the young men away from their fishing, their farming, the oppressive idyll of their country lives. Woven through the generals’ recruitment speeches are insidious melodies – words like “patriot” and “defense”, “fight”, “death”, “immortality” and “glory”, like drugs to be chased after, lusted for. Teenage heads filling with images of greatness and adventure beyond their fishing rivers, the dusty fields where their cattle grazed quietly, their places where they enjoyed a kind of peace and freedom that nevertheless felt like a shackle – these barely surviving little frontier villages, picked almost at random to offer up their boys, like prisons of inconsequentiality and boredom, places to be escaped from at any cost for the chance to be Great Men.
They sign up and are led away, and are swallowed up into a mountain.
One would be hard-pressed to call Rick Bass’s latest novel The Diezmo anti-war (based loosely around the 1842 Mier Expedition); and if there are parallels between the ill-fated mission of a hastily assembled early Texan militia and the current administration’s prosecution of the Iraq War and the ensuing insurgencies, Bass doesn’t go out of his way to point them out or pound them into our consciousness. On the other hand, it’s impossible to read The Diezmo without considering the nature of the war at hand, the individuals pursuing it and those fighting it, the stories emerging from it, and the thousands of quiet tragedies we’ll never be privy to.
The Diezmo can’t be an anti-war novel, because at its essence, it seems to carry a sense of regretful inevitability, a sense that no matter how many soldiers live to be old men to tell its horrors, the drug of war, as pushed by dictators and generals, fathers and presidents – its bloody drama, the brotherly camaraderie, the tantalizing alive-ness of it – will always find willing addicts. Nevertheless, this is a long, bleak nightmare of a tale, recounted in the voice of one of the expedition’s few survivors fifty years after the fact, the voice of an old man recounting the foolishness of his youth, the foolishness of all of those youths, the intricate shifts in allegiances, the moments of suicidal desperation and determination, the consumptive longings and unexpected obsessions, the atrocities committed by boys who would have fainted at the sight of blood, all manner of deadly ironies.
And though the story may read as something of a confessional, there’s very little in terms of redemption. Instead, it’s a grueling epiphany of a disastrous choice, as if out of nowhere, the consequences of that life-defining time had chosen to suddenly and belatedly reveal themselves as an old man surveyed his freshly plowed fields. In the opening chapter, the narrator briefly reveals his current distance from the events he tells. But from then on, there are only tiny hints left here and there to suggest than any time has past at all – until the end.
The narrative is relentless, taking us from the sunny fields of LaGrange where the narrator and his best friend join an impromptu militia ostensibly to guard the Texas/Mexico border and defend the new Republic’s freedom, to an hitherto unimaginable bloodbath in Laredo (which brought to mind photographs of the April 2004 massacre in Fallujah), across the Rio Grande and into Mexico where the militia is decimated by battle and desertions, and finally into the militia’s seemingly endless imprisonment.
Bass’s language has a simple elegance to it, a manly dignity to it that eschews both flowery asides and unnecessary macho-isms – in many respects recalling the stateliness of Ulysses Grant’s war memoirs. It is strictly linear in its chronology, and relies most heavily on well-chosen details, and simple metaphorical motifs. There are numerous references to streets, deserts, and stones being “painted red” by soldier’s blood. And then, in one scene describing the sickening disintegration of an escape attempt, Bass writes of a the mountain “bleeding men”.
Likewise, his characterizations of the narrator’s fellow prisoners are both spare and vivid, and as one by one, they die, are wounded, attempt to escape, we find ourselves caring for them, hoping for them, reviling them, mourning them even when we know very little about who they are. Bass makes them all individuals, all on their own journeys, all wondering at their own choices, multiplying the present narrative into something both monstrous and monumental.
The book is divided into six rather lengthy chapters, but despite this and the often contemplative tone of the book, it is a uniformly bracing read – and at just over 200 pages, a compact one as well.
Bass’s choice to center the story on an early military misadventure by the Republic of Texas, a country “born of blood”, certainly adds a contemporary weight to the book. With Bush’s shortsighted handling of Iraq, the bloated, macho language he used (and uses) to defend his choice, the unilateralism with which he’s pursued it, our present war is quintessentially Texan. Bass himself is a native Texan and he’s written The Diezmo with a palpable sense of heritage – neither pride nor shame, but ownership. As such, this is neither a political tirade from either side of the current political Rio Grande, nor an idealistic anti-war treatise. It is merely, but also monumentally, a lament for the lives lost to the war’s perfidy, the lives of those who die on the battlefield, and those who survive to realize the lostness of their life in an accumulation of years.
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