"My Jihad"

This craving for armed conflict, more than hatred of Western culture, seems to be what drives the author and many of his comrades. Collins sees his strange new world through a Hollywood lens. Walking into the mud "chow hall" at Khalid Bin Whalid and beholding the "strange-looking earthen ovens with open fire pits," he instantly thinks "it seemed like a place where the Sand People from 'Star Wars' might like to throw a party, roasting Ewoks before eating them." Russian bases remind him of "the bridge scene in 'Apocalypse Now'"; the vengeful CIA, pissed at him for refusing to conduct a mission to Chechnya he deemed too foolhardy, is compared to "the crazy woman in the movie 'Fatal Attraction'"; and solitary "wanderers" who roamed through the mountains of Chechnya fighting injustice bring to mind Clint Eastwood. This saturation in movies is of a piece with Collins' displaced Americanness, with his refusal to eat the weird food (lentil dahl) in the training camp and his pique at the disorganization of the mujahedin groups who can never get it together to send someone to meet him at the airport. But his fellow holy warriors were also under the sway of silver-screen heroics.

After Collins has cheerfully undergone both an appendectomy and major leg surgery under primitive conditions in Chechnya, he recounts days spent in a hospital with other wounded rebel soldiers, "yelling and cheering at cheesy Hollywood action movies." Bruce Lee was "always a favorite"; one group of mujahedin discussed "what would happen if we had Bruce Lee on our side. Most of them were of the opinion that it would turn the tide of the war in our favor simply because the Russians would be too scared to fight Bruce Lee." ("Van Damme was always booed" for reasons that are never made clear.) The patients watch "Braveheart" many times, and "one Chechen fighter who had lost his arms would always jump up and demonstrate to all of us how he would swing a sword like Mel Gibson if he still had arms. 'Look, I'm so fast you can't see my hands,' he would say as he swung his stumps around."

Collins' own leg is eventually amputated during one of his respites in the U.S. It doesn't slow him down much, and soon enough he's headed back toward "the action." It's impossible not to admire Collins' astonishing physical courage -- I finally lost count of the hair's-breadth escapes recounted in "My Jihad," -- but it's also unnerving. There's a kind of imaginative poverty to Collins' capacity for risk-taking, a bit like that found in people who never get jealous. Of course, those who think too much often find themselves unable to act at all, and both cowardice and jealousy are unsavory emotions, but to be so limpidly violent as Collins requires almost a willed lack of self-examination and self-knowledge.

Perhaps this what soldiers are made of -- and young ones at that; Collins began to suffer more fear in combat situations once he got into his late 20s and had a son back in the U.S. But age does not seem to bring Collins much wisdom when it comes to his personal life. He blames the secrecy of his intelligence work for estranging his first wife (an American girlfriend who converted to marry him); the possibility that she got sick of a husband who spent long periods of time overseas trying to get killed, marrying another woman and needing to be wired money doesn't occur to him.

There are even more disturbing contradictions in "My Jihad." Collins describes his remorse after shooting, by necessity, an Azeri gangster who had been sent to assassinate him. The men's eyes meet, and Collins thinks: "He had been trying to kill me only a second earlier, but I knew it wasn't personal, and now I felt an incredible sense of compassion for him." Compassion he did not feel, however, for the Russian soldier who he stabs virtually in his bed during one stealth attack on a barracks in the Chechen countryside. "An older guy, with a scruffy face, he reeked of sweat, cigarettes, and vodka. I pull back his head, looked into his eyes, and cut his throat."

This victim, of course, belonged to a nation of people Collins refers to as "pigs." Collins doesn't seem to be aware that not all Russian soldiers in Chechnya perpetrate war crimes, that many of them are trapped in that nightmarish, dehumanizing conflict through no choice of their own, much as Collins' own father was in Vietnam. To kill with such cool dispatch, you must be able to reduce the victim to his membership in a fraternity of subhuman swine. Or perhaps it's just war, in other words "nothing personal." Why a hired killer merits compassion in this context and an enemy soldier doesn't is just the sort of paradox you must ignore to earn a place among the "strange few who knew war and loved it nonetheless."

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