An Otherwise Healthy Person by Ron Jansen

Reviewed by Joelene Pynnonen

A deeply personal, powerfully vulnerable memoir of a Marine squad leader’s experiences in Fallujah, Iraq and the aftermath

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Ron Jansen resolves to do something to protect his country. 

Despite having an enviable life in Michigan, a stunning wife, loving family, and a good job, he joins the Marines. Deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, he and his team find their courage, bodies, and morals pushed to limits they had not experienced before. 

Being away from everything he cherishes might seem like the most difficult thing Ron will ever have to experience, but when he arrives home, he comes to realize that perils may lurk in surprisingly innocuous places. Leaving the war zone might have ended one kind of battle, but Ron and his wife, Anne, have a new one to contend with. One that has an entirely different set of rules to the ones in Iraq.

An Otherwise Healthy Person is a military memoir that chronicles Ron Jansen’s deployment in Fallujah, Iraq and his subsequent return to civilian life. Photographs of his time in the military and the people he served with appear throughout. Jansen does a fantastic job of describing life as a Marine in a way that ordinary people could understand. For those who want the details, there is a glossary of military terms, but the writing is adroit enough that it isn’t needed for comprehension.

Any book with zingers like “He stood out like a turd on a waxed floor” in the opening pages is bound to be an entertaining read no matter the content. An Otherwise Healthy Person fulfills those initial high expectations brilliantly. The writing is wonderful. Simple and direct but with powerful imagery. Jansen weaves in a surprising amount of intertextuality to build a picture of his life in the Marines. Song lyrics, short stories, poems, novels. All these snippets serve to describe conditions that most of us will never experience. With a couple of lines from a country song, deployment is compared to prison. At first, it’s a jarring picture, but on reflection, the similarities are clear. Whether deployed or in prison, you can’t see family, there are no comforts of home, phone privileges are rare and sacred, and you are relegated outside of general society.

Jansen not only explains how life in a war zone feels, he has the rare ability to draw a complete picture of his teammates, friends, and family in just one or two carefully crafted sentences. Despite the fact that a lot of people are touched on in this memoir, there’s the undeniable feeling that you know them well even if they’re not on the page for long. 

Reading a military memoir is an interesting endeavor. On the one hand, you expect the memoirist to be as honest with you as they are with themselves. When it comes to military though, it presents a unique problem. There’s a degree of disconnection between enemies who are out to kill each other. In An Otherwise Healthy Person, this can cause Jansen to think of a situation involving an animal being killed when an insurgent has died. More animal than human. It’s not presented unkindly, and most of the time it feels matter of fact. The fact that it’s written in a way that feels so natural is probably the most uncomfortable aspect of this, but it also highlights how much the human mind seeks to other people in order to protect itself.

An Otherwise Healthy Person captures the intricacies of deployment well. The loneliness despite being surrounded by a team that would risk their lives for you, the mundanity in between missions, the discomfort, and the danger. As the squad leader, Ron struggles to balance his duty with the safety of his team and to retain his morals and humanity. There’s a degree of self-reflection and honesty in these pages that would be rare for anyone. 

This is an authentic, fascinating read that will make you come away with a deeper appreciation of the vast range of human experience.

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