An exercise in torment

In this intense, painful, excellent war novel, former Private John Bartle, a young man from rural Virginia, looks back on his tour of duty in northern Iraq in 2004. He tries to explain what it was like to kill, and what it was like to be under fire. He tries to make sense of the relationships he had with other soldiers. His brain is full of lurid visions, the memories he is constantly attacked and ambushed by. But he can’t make sense of them, because he can’t find a way back to the person he was before the war. His story is an exercise in torment.

Why did he join the army? Why did his friend Daniel ‘Murph’ Murphy, who did not come back, join the army? ‘We’d had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams,’ he tells us. So they chose war. And they find that, in war, their lives are even smaller. They find more dirt roads, and even smaller dreams. Bartle lies in the dirt, clutching it, digging his fingers into it, aspiring to nothing greater than not being killed in that very instant. He has joined the army, he sees, because he wanted somebody to tell him what to do. And now he knows this was a huge, huge mistake.

He remembers making a promise to Murph’s mother. ‘I promise I’ll bring him home to you,’ he says — a rash promise, as it turns out. His superior, Sergeant Sterling, overhears him. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Private,’ says Sterling. Then Sterling beats him up. He smashes his face in. Sterling has been to Iraq before. He is psychotic and damaged. He is the sort of person who might go into a bar and beat up the barmaid.