SCOTT SIMON, host:
Benjamin Busch is a man with many dimensions and multiple resumes. One charts his service in the U.S. Marine Corps, from infantry officer school in Quantico in 1993 to commander of Delta Company, serving in Iraq, and his promotion to lieutenant colonel in 2007. Then there's his other resume as a technical adviser, director and actor, from "Party of Five" to "The Wire" to the new TV show called "The Beast," with Patrick Swayze. He may need to start a third resume soon, for his writing. He's a contributor to Harper's magazine. And the February issue includes his essay "Bearing Arms: The Serious Boy at War."
We need to say welcome back to our show. We first met you in November of 2005. You and your father the novelist Frederick Busch were on our show. You were serving in Iraq, and he'd written in Harper's what it was like to have you fighting on the other side of the world. Thanks very much for being back with us.
Mr. BENJAMIN BUSCH (Writer): Thank you for having me. You know, a number of people have gone to your Web site to that interview, mostly to hear his voice again, but I can't do it yet, you know, it isn't a common thing to have your farewells recorded, and that interview ends with our last goodbyes. I never had a chance to say goodbye when he died?
SIMON: I'm glad you're back. By the way, Benjamin Busch joins us from the Interlochen studios in Michigan. Well, you write in this article in Harper's about how your parents didn't want you to have guns when you were growing up. What was their thinking, and what began to change in your life?
Mr. BUSCH: Well, you know, I think ultimately you become who you are despite the best intentions of your parents, and I was born in 1968, kind of at the height of that conflict. Their intentions were very good that they would seek to avoid contributing to conflict, and they try to keep me from it as all parents do. And, you know, I found my way despite that.
SIMON: I was struck by - in this memoir, I was struck by the section, maybe you can recreate a bit of it for us - your father, who had not liked guns - you went off to the Marine Corps, and he took possession of your gun?
Mr. BUSCH: Yeah.
SIMON: Because it was important to you, he made it a part of his life.
Mr. BUSCH: He did, it became his own. My father had a very strange relationship to nature. His mother had been a naturalist, and it had offended him for life.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BUSCH: And he was both amused and fascinated by nature, but also horrified by it. And there was always this sense that, you know, you don't step into a river and you don't go into the forest, really, because nature is in there.
SIMON: Yeah.
Mr. BUSCH: And nature wants to kill you, so...
SIMON: Your father was such a wise man.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BUSCH: He was. And I was...
SIMON: I'm not going into the forest until they, until they put a Starbucks there, but go ahead (laughing).
Mr. BUSCH: (laughing) Well, you know, because of that maybe, and because of who I was, I was completely the opposite. I was the child who said, I have no idea what's in there, so that's where I'm going. And I think pursuit of war almost was the same thing, and the great incomprehension of it was what in some ways drew me in - besides service alone was, you know, the same thing that draws people to stare at fires. There's a fascination to the things we just don't quite get, and in a place where there is danger, some people have a need to say I am not afraid, and I was that way.
SIMON: Explain the Marine Corps' very famous rifle creed to us if you could, the one that begins, This is my rifle.
Mr. BUSCH: This is my rifle. Marines really have a Spartan relationship to military service. And what defines them is that they are all riflemen. It doesn't matter what your military occupational specialty becomes after you are swept into the arms of the Marine Corps, but you are always first a rifleman. That bond between you and your rifle is something which is bred into you in training, and it really becomes something that you feel you're missing thereafter because of how serious that relationship is trained to be. So there comes that famous beginning, This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine. You know, it literally says in there, without my rifle I am useless, you know, without my rifle I am useless. And that language itself, strange at it seems, follows you, become very powerfully ingrained somewhere. And who knows how the folds of the mind work, but the stuff that gets caught in there doesn't go away. I think, you know, in the writing of all these things, that memories feed into the fabric of your thinking. They seemed to migrate towards certain words and ideas, and when you focus on the life that has gathered around you, you can see the weave, and I just started writing the weave. I don't understand how memories work, but I finally learned why we keep them, and since my parents died it seems to have crystallized a certain focus on my past.
SIMON: Some of the most startling sections of this memoir are of course when you describe what it's like to be under fire.
Mr. BUSCH: At that point your choices are made for you in many ways. Instinct is combined with emotion, and I think that war weighs on you with such emotional complexity that your fatigue is really from the tiring of your mind. You live by constant counterbalancing, but the tension is always underneath. And I don't know afterwards if it goes away. I think that I've just become accustomed to it.
SIMON: I - if I might quote just a couple of - a few of your words. Something explodes, try running through a city like that, the phosphorous burn of tracers flashing too bright for your eyes to adjust to, gone as fast as they pass. You don't know how long you will have to stay on the roof that you've found yourself on. You've ordered the family of the home into a room beneath you, you were out of order; you hope that the rest of the bats in your unit know that it's you on the roof as they hurl themselves into the area to reinforce. Someone is shooting, watch the tracers, keep low, you may be there all night, you may be there for the rest of your life. You watch the alleys and the windows for anyone you don't know. You don't know anyone.
Mr. BUSCH: I think despite the masses that you go forth in, you know, a unit even a small as a fire team of four Marines feels like a mass because you protect yourselves with each other and you make yourselves larger, and it's like - it's putting on a certain armor. But in the end there's just you and bullets. War like art is a solitary event.
SIMON: Have you ever been tempted to put your rifle away, get rid of it?
Mr. BUSCH: No. It's my rifle.
SIMON: Benjamin Busch - actor, writer, Marine. His memoir "Bearing Arms: The Serious Boy at War," appears in the February issue of Harper's magazine. Thank you so much, Ben.
Mr. BUSCH: Thank you so much for having me, Scott.
SIMON: And this is Weekend Edition from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.