Rating: WARTY!
I gave up on this at one third the way through it. I know they say war is a lot of sitting around waiting, punctuated by intense action, but this novel - in the third of I could stand to read - consisted of nothing but sitting around and no action at all. All there was, was soldiers introspectively hashing endlessly over and over what they're doing there, what the political purpose is, what the stressors are, and it goes round and round. Nothing came out of any of this, and there was literally nothing else on offer here. That was fine for the first few pages, but every single page was the same, relentlessly and without end for page after page. It was boring. How you can make a story about the Iraq 'conflict' boring is a mystery to me, but this author achieved it.
I don't expect a novel like this to be endless action either. That would be boring, too, and amateurish, but I do expect, in a war zone, some warlike activity to be taking place, and there was none in sight here. It was so tedious that I was simply not prepared to suck it up for however many more pages it took to get there (assuming we ever got anywhere other than here).
The sad thing is that this was written by someone who has been there and done that, so I thought at the very least it would offer some interesting insights into life over there, but it really didn't, unless life over there was one long nonstop run of boredom from start to finish, which is not my experience form other things I've read about it. I honestly believe that a true biography of this author's time there would have been more entertaining than this novel. It certainly could not have been less so. Even if life was boring, there's no need whatsoever, in a work of fiction, to transmit that to the reader.
For a novel set in such an exotic location, there was nothing to excite the senses here, nothing revelatory, nothing humorous, and nothing to engage the mind, unless you happen to be one of the probably very rare people who is quite literally clueless about Iraq and what went on there. That aside, there was nothing here that you would not have gleaned from watching the nightly news in 2004 (when this novel is set). In fact you would likely have gained more, because this gave me no insights and very little by way of explanation of the whys and wherefores of the activity the soldiers were engaged in. For example, one day they go out to conduct a census in a street somewhere, and never is the purpose of the survey explained. Yes, of course it's to discover who lives where and how many there are, but to what ultimate end? I got no idea from this novel.
One big problem was the endless meandering back and forth with constant flashbacks without any good reason. They contributed nothing to the story for me, and worse, they did nothing save add to the tedium. I took to skimming these in short order. This addiction to flashback-ing ill-served the story too, as I shall explain here! The author gives times in military time of course, but there is no punctuation, so instead of 20:35, we got 2035. This was the first time I saw a time in numeric form in this novel, and I thought it was a date. It honestly looked like, in context, one of the soldiers was flash-forwarding, fantasizing or looking forward to a date thirty years into the future where he would be retired from the military and hanging with his friend having survived and lived to a ripe(r) old age, but he was actually just talking about eight thirty-five that evening! It was confusing for a second or two and then provided the only laugh I got from this novel!
I like a good military read with something to say, but this wasn't it, and I cannot recommend it based on the portion I read.
