5 Things I Learned About The Military From “Breakfast With The Dirt Cult”

1. The little things matter even more

You’d be hating your life, then you’d see some goofy bastard do or say something hysterical or perform some heroic GI Joe feat of awesomeness and you think, “Good Lord, these bastards are outfuckingstanding!” and you’d just be thankful for the cards you’d drawn.

2. The military provides no exception to the rules of the sexual marketplace

I noticed that much like at school, girls gravitated to certain types of guys. Hell, there were girls who became absolutely feral like they had to meet a dick quota or they’d get fired, then you’d go to a bookstore and see magazines where women bitched about how guys treated girls.

3. The call of duty can sometimes ring hollow, even for the most dedicated of soldiers

As you can tell, the military is a moveable feast of bullshit. You swear the Oath, then you realize how the service really is, then you make your peace with the suckitude, and if you’re lucky, wind up being a part of something more and partaking in an experience that’s kind of a mystery cult (hence the title).

4. The guys on the ground sometimes feel that they are just pawns in a game

When you consider that modern liberal democracy itself may be a sham, and that guys like Edward Bernays were right in that the real power in a polity is in the hands of those who shape the opinions, beliefs, preferences, and prejudices of the electorate, the shit flat out goes plaid. It means we’re fundamentally wrong about a lot of things; that shit has been fucked since way back and that a hell of a lot of people (theirs and ours) have died under false pretenses.

5. It’s a story that’s not being told

As a guy who loves books and stories, it pissed me off that no one writes about or for them. This was a completely random group of young men from 18-35 from all over the country, and they’re out there kicking ass. There’s so much that I felt was significant about them and the role they played; and yet what stories were celebrated in print and TV? Sex and the City. That sort of bullshit.

Finlay is a man who was wounded serving our country and lived to tell the tale. He writes from a red pill perspective that you would never find in the glorified and sanitized Hollywood portrayals of war. The account is raw and uncensored, but it possesses the verisimilitude necessary for a book to stay with you long after you read it.

This is the author himself on the impetus for the work:

It is a novelized account of a period during my enlistment as an infantryman in which I got caught between a soon-to-be-ex-stripper and the Afghanistan campaign, then after being wounded downrange and consummating the affair, had all hell break loose on me.

In trying slog through the anger, hurt, and confusion that went with coming home, and generally try to make sense of it all, my thoughts led me to the belief that many of those who shape the ideas that influence everything from love to war have taken us upon a self-destructive course. And in our folly, we have marched to their cadence. While this makes it thoroughly in opposition to PC orthodoxies, there were things I saw that I felt needed to be told.

Finally, our own Matt Forney had this to say about Finlay’s first novel:

As a coming-of-age story, a young man’s awakening to the reality of the world, it’s not only (mostly) well-written but unique. When Finlay is at his best, he captures the Slaughterhouse Five-level lunacy of modern America and the unease he had of living through it […] I can’t wait to see what Finlay comes up with next.

Click here to see what everyone is talking about and buy Breakfast With The Dirt Cult today—it’s only $2.56 on Kindle.