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.