The opening of Matthew Komatsu’s essay, “Calling Jody with the Ghost Brigade,” is one of the more vivid openings from the May 2017 issue of The Spirit of Disruption. Komatsu, a pararescueman, describes the aftermath of an insurgent attack with phrases like “Ben flicks bits of an Iraqi linguist from his body armor” (82), “Anthony emerges from a dream, covered in the blood of Marines he couldn’t save” (82), and “the living fall in alongside the dead and come to attention” (82). Throughout “Calling Jody with the Ghost Brigade,” as Komatsu shifts between running races and an attack that killed some of his men, he uses such vivid, poetic language to paint the scene.
While the first sentence, in fact the first two paragraphs of the essay, paint the scene of war, he waits until the first full paragraph on page 83 to paint the scene of a race start, when “the starter’s pistol under the whup-whup of the news helicopter released a rainbow thrash of technical tees and multicolored running shoes.” He conveys size in both multitude and weightiness, the “whup-whup” forcing the reader to think of military helicopters in addition to news helicopters. This is echoed again on page 85 as Komatsu describes attending the funeral of two of his fallen men, “each passing ritual eroding my facade until the marital beat of approaching helicopters boomed in my chest.” He is running this marathon as much for himself as he is for his fallen men. And his use of “rainbow thrash of technical tees and multicolored running shoes” adds another layer of seriousness to this race. It is not an amateur race. Runners are dressed to win, not simply finish. This is echoed on page 88 when he catches up with “one of the women’s elite marathoners,” then takes the reader with them as they drop “down last the library, its architecture a reflection of the ubiquitous iron-ore ships of Lake Superior. Beyond the train depot and over the dying miles of Interstate 35; around the convention center and the USS William Irvin, a floating-museum-turned-haunted-house once a year.” The reader can picture the run, and feel the movement as if running with him.
This holds true for the firefight, too. On page 91, he finally describes the attack that took the men he honors as he runs. With the same laser-like precision that opened the essay, Komatsu skips no detail about the death of Lt. Col. Christopher Raible. For Lt. Col. Raible, he slows down the action, focusing on “a fragment of molten iron that unzips” that also “spins end-over-end until it buries. in the dun talcum powder of Afghanistan.” His word choice in this scene conveys the experience of watching a man shot dead, and like his description of running through town, it carries the reader with him, putting them in his place, as if the reader is also at his side, watching a bullet enter and kill.
Whether it’s a marathon of running, or a marathon of fighting six hours to cover a mile of ground to reach a dead soldier, Komatsu puts the reader next to him, embedded in the experience.