Eat the apple

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.