One Man's War on the Homefront

Arnold L. Punaro with David Poyer, On War and Politics: the Battlefield Inside Washington's Beltway

Second Lieutenant Arnold Punaro took a bullet in a distant Vietnamese valley, and woke up with a Purple Heart pinned to his hospital pillow. Having joined the Marines fresh from college to avoid getting drafted into the Army, he always considered himself a short-timer, but now he had a permanent reminder of his tour. After snagging a graduate degree on the GI Bill, he accepted a job for long-serving Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, and his adventure continued.

With a secondary title like “The Battlefield Inside Washington’s Beltway,” I anticipated a scholarly analysis of the intersections, and disconnections, between American political process and military action. Unfortunately, no. I might’ve enjoyed such a book, but this is Arnold Punaro’s memoir of stumbling into the halls of power, almost by accident, if his stories hold water. If you can clear away expectations generated by the somewhat misleading title, this is a fairly interesting read.

Much like his joining the Marines, which he did simply to avoid something worse, Punaro’s entry into America’s political establishment was more fluke than design. He answered a flyer hanging at the University of Georgia for senatorial interns, because the woman he loved was working in Washington. Senator Nunn, a young upstart then, needed office staff from his home state. And Punaro’s journalism degree made him valuable back before social media set America’s political tone.

Eventually, though, this accidental job became an important calling. Senator Nunn, a famously convivial speaker and ambitious personality, became the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and having a Purple Heart on his staff became a priceless asset. Punaro quickly became the Senator’s right-hand man on all matters military. His life’s circumstances, which seemed like chance at the time, conspired to make him insanely powerful, without ever running for office.

Punaro, with ghostwriter David Poyer, writes in a linear, straightforward manner, like somebody telling stories over drinks. He occasionally tosses out flashbacks or peeks ahead, but his story unfolds mostly in sequence. Brief interruptions from his wife Jan, who exerted powerful but not always intentional influence over his life, have a sort of “Now honey, tell it right” quality which increases the personal texture. This isn’t a polemic; it’s an engaging story between trusted friends.

Arnold L. Punaro

Punaro’s career has caromed between categories of public service. Despite leaving the Corps, he remained a reservist, and was mobilized during Desert Storm, making him an important living link between two eras of American military history. He eventually achieved the rank of Major General and, after leaving Senator Nunn’s office, took a prominent billet at Quantico. I don’t fear revealing this, since Punaro’s service is public record; but his storytelling gives events life.

Not surprisingly, Punaro’s encounters with power include some pretty notable names of his generation. From Richard Nixon to Dan Quayle, from Scoop Jackson to Dick Cheney, Punaro name-drops encounters with men (mostly, indeed, men) whose names became synonymous with power politics and American history. Sometimes he underplays them for humor: he subtly pretends nothing unusual matters about rubbing shoulders at Quantico with a lowly Marine captain named Oliver North. We wait for the other shoe to drop.

It may surprise nobody who’s read memoirs like this before, that Punaro’s life trajectory culminates in private enterprise. Now CEO of a public policy consultancy, Punaro has cultivated a media presence, of which this book is only the latest component. Surprisingly, his business ventures have dealt more with budget and technology than defense, a fact one has to Google, since Punaro’s final chapters compress the last twenty years into eighteen pages. Weirdly enough, self-promotion requires unexpected modesty.

Although throughout this book, Punaro essentially markets himself as product, his prose doesn’t have the huckstering feel of other books by professional consultants I’ve read recently. He shares lessons he’s learned, lessons that have made him practical and non-ideological in an increasingly bifurcated political scene; but I never get the “Gimme a buck for the white paper” vibe. He just comes across like a guy whose seemingly uncoordinated life choices paid off in understated success.

Punaro tells his story to make himself sound remarkably like the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker profile, the fortunate brother whose combination of preparation and luck led him to fortune. Punaro’s behind-the-scenes influence spans decades, and he himself is an example of America’s possibilities and perils. Though I admit, I might’ve liked more insight into the intersection between military and public policy, Punaro’s own experience within the field is both engaging and eye-opening.

America Has a Hero Worship Problem

Donald Trump

By now, we’ve all seen the footage. Republican presidential aspirant Donald Trump, at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa on Saturday, describes losing faith in Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for squandering the 2008 presidential campaign. The moderator pipes up, in a voice half joking, half whining: “But he’s a war hero!” The Donald snipes back: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Okay, Trump’s comment was completely classless and lacking common human empathy. But c’mon, in some polls, nearly a quarter of likely Republican primary voters support Trump’s bid, which surely reflects attraction to his blunt, unreconstructed style. It surely isn’t Trump’s policy positions—he’s enunciated none—or his personal charm. Trump leads in many major polls, and will probably dominate next month’s debate stage, because he openly belittles career politicians and Washington insiders, especially fellow Republicans.

Rank-and-file party leadership has aggressively defended McCain, partly because Trump’s inexcusable language risks tainting the debate pool, but mostly because it gives them opportunity to squelch an uncontainable maverick. The irony of supporting McCain on these terms deserves mention, but let’s continue: the moderator whom Trump out-shouted possibly deserved a decent tongue-lashing. That obsequious party toady didn’t defend McCain’s national service or war record. He threw “war hero” out to deflect a completely unrelated argument.

America loves creating war heroes. From Congress Critters who themselves got Vietnam-era student deferments, but slap “Support Our Troops” magnets on their bumpers, to ordinary citizens stopping BDU-clad grunts in grocery lines to say “Thank you for your service,” we love honoring our veterans. Media harridans from Fox to MSNBC gleefully chased Eric Shinseki from President Obama’s Cabinet when VA backlogs became too embarrassing to deny. Honoring troops rivals football for America’s real national passtime.

John McCain

Unless it involves actually doing anything. America’s all-volunteer military, which knew a recruitment surge following the 9/11 attacks, has recently pitted, requiring loosening of Defense Department standards so convicts and dropouts can enlist. We cry foul when VA backlogs apparently hasten veteran suicides, but repeatedly re-elect legislators who consider VA spending “waste” and stonewall medical treatment, medical health, and veterans’ housing reform. We love to name-check our soldiers’ sacrifices without addressing our veterans’ living conditions.

Few veterans have enjoyed John McCain’s post-military star trajectory. Veterans have higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and substance abuse problems than the general population. They’re more likely to wind up imprisoned, their voting rights stripped and the freedom they fought for legally curtailed. My own sister, who did two hitches overseas during Operation Iraqi Freedom, had a job application unlawfully wadded up in her face because employers couldn’t be bothered with her continuing Reserve commitment.

This goes double for non-white, non-male veterans. As a percentage, Native American men are more likely to join the Army than any other racial group. They’re also the most likely to face unemployment upon discharge. Despite recent outrages over college sexual assault, women are more likely to face rape in the military than any other career field. The Army’s own numbers concede that one in three military women get raped, often by a direct superior.

“Support our troops” generally has little basis in actual troop actions. In 2005, I joined several local citizens in petitioning our Congressman, a Republican, to support peaceful withdrawal from Iraq. Then-Representative Tom Osborne refused, saying that to withdraw would “dishonor” the service of those who’d previously fought. By 2005, a slim majority of Americans already recognized that Iraq had slipped beyond military solutions. But our Congressman used troops to justify throwing good money after bad.

This weekend’s attempt to use Senator McCain’s war record as shield against criticism is entirely consistent with this trajectory. Rather than attempting to challenge Trump on his vacuous policies, his reliance on personal insults, or his basically incoherent demeanor, the moderator defended McCain by name-checking his “war hero” status. Okay, so The Donald handled the deflection disgracefully. But he shouldn’t have needed to handle it anyway. The moderator used a distracting, ridiculous non sequitur argument.

If we really considered soldiers heroes, we could express our admiration in useful ways. We could provide returning veterans with meaningful, uplifting work. We could pursue systems of internal military justice so women and soldiers of color know America has their back, at home and abroad. Or, here’s a wild thought, we could stop committing American lives to useless wars that only glorify politicians who never risk themselves. That would really be “supporting our troops.”

Mr. Lincoln's Very Long Shadow

James M. McPherson, The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters

Visit any American bookstore, and head for the History section. Though world history in all its flavors enjoys generous shelf space, two periods occupy the greatest share. World War II and, especially, the American Civil War retain unmatched holds on American imaginations, in ways that bespeak our identity as a nation. If the Revolution created the American state, the Civil War created the American People. Its legacy remains very present, 150 years later.

Princeton historian James McPherson, whose half-century career has helped shape current attitudes about the Civil War, purposes here not to create a new history of the American Civil War, but to ruminate upon its import. This proves valuable because, reading along, it’s impossible to miss the resonances between the history McPherson describes, and today’s live issues. In McPherson’s telling, the past is present, and something we must wrestle with to this day.

Why did General Grant and Admiral Farragut succeed, while General McClellan and Admiral DuPont failed? The traits which defined our winning commanders still describe what characteristics we seek in politicians, business professionals, and other leaders. Or, how about this question: who freed the slaves? Most Americans reflexively say “Abraham Lincoln” or “the Thirteenth Amendment,” but McPherson musters diverse evidence proving this question defies any single simple answer.

McPherson traffics, not in knowledge, but in debates. Many essays respond to, or argue with, other historians, whose opinions and interpretations reveal how hotly contested the Civil War’s heritage remains. These responses sometimes seem inconsistent. In one essay, he disputes Yale theologian Harry Stout’s assertion that the Union cannot claim Just War status under conventional Christian mores. McPherson systematically dismantles Stout’s facts, and presents a persuasive counter-argument.

His very next essay, however, rejects Mark Neely’s account that the Civil War was characterized by “remarkable restraint.” Though McPherson says General Sherman “did not even commit the ‘wanton pillage’ of Southern legend,” he nevertheless cannot countenance the claim that a war which killed two percent of the American population showed “restraint.” Thus McPherson demonstrates his greatest point, that the Civil War resists pat answers and simple nationalistic bromides.

James M. McPherson

One essay, “Lincoln, Slavery, and Freedom,” describes how, throughout the war, the Union’s core motivating issue evolved, and with it, the American principle of freedom. North and South were divided by competing definitions of freedom: Southern slaveholders believed Northern regulation impeded economic freedom, the freedom of wealthy individuals to own and exploit other human beings. McPherson quotes Southern documents that precisely echo contemporary Tea Party definitions of freedom.

Elsewhere, an essay about General George McClellan, America’s youngest General-in-Chief ever, presents a stark split. McClellan succeeded Winfield Scott in command because his will to execute swift, unambiguous action apparently provided the moral backbone Lincoln demanded. Except, once he assumed command, this gentleman soldier became paranoid, indecisive, and timid. The change in McClellan highlights the gulf between American peacetime and wartime cultures.

And McPherson’s final essay stretches beyond the war itself. Radical Republicans attempted to force justice into Southern law, but declared victory around 1877, and went home. Southern Democrats then wrote bigotry, exploitation, and injustice into their laws—laws which remained enforced a full century after fighting ended. Some economic firebrands have attempted, recently, to roll back history to those post-Reconstruction times, forcing McPherson, and us, to ask: who really won the war?

This slim book, under 170 pages plus back matter, doesn’t pretend to resolve every question the Civil War raises. Not really a single book, but a collection of twelve essays, McPherson assumes readers’ prior familiarity with Civil War history. His broad view stretches from the war’s roots, in the racialized propaganda of the Mexican-American war, to Reconstruction’s long shadow, when the Confederates who lost the war arguably won the peace.

For James McPherson, history isn’t dead accumulations of facts. History encompasses debates about motivations, ways living societies define concepts like “justice” and “freedom,” and what bedrock principles make America truly American. To McPherson, the American state may have begun in 1776 (or 1789), but the American nation, the people who define themselves according to consistent principles and just laws, achieved adulthood between 1861 and 1865.

Now, McPherson never explicitly highlights the similarities between Civil War history and the present. He never comments directly upon current events; his historical ruminations only unfold through the Civil Rights Movement, and then only briefly. But he needn’t actually say any more. Attentive readers will observe that, on multiple issues—gun control, economic restraint, leadership, and more—the past is, in McPherson’s telling, visibly present.

Cry "Havoc!" and Let Slip

Richard Overy, A History of War in 100 Battles

Whatever you think of war and its social implications, one cannot deny its evolving social structures and lasting consequences. From Greeks with spears, to archers and lancers, to today’s digitally coded, technologically intense battlefield, war continues to hold prominence among forces shaping human society. British historian Richard Overy crafts a far-reaching, lavishly illustrated history of how war evolves with human society, and vice versa, utilizing one hundred dramatic examples of direct conflict and close combat.

Some of Overy’s choices are obvious: no thoroughgoing history of war could conscionably overlook the Spanish Armada, Gettysburg, or Guadalcanal. But Overy also describes obscure conflicts. Non-historians may consider Maipû, Solferino, or Omdurman esoteric, but Overy persuasively contends they embody war’s ever-evolving trends, and influence everything coming after. And though we may not easily recall the Milvian Bridge, Agincourt, and Dien Bien Phu, in Overy’s telling, their historical significance demands equal treatment and careful consideration.

Overy divides his list into six distinguishing categories: Leadership, Against the Odds, Innovation, Deception, Courage in the Face of Fire, and In the Nick of Time. The category titles are pretty self-explanatory: Nelson at Trafalgar was a superior leader, while the Athenians at Marathon beat superior forces by loud displays of courage. Within each category, Overy lists the battles sequentially, allowing patterns to develop across centuries and geography. Overy paints sweeping themes with poetic panache.

Particularly in battles before the Nineteenth Century, Overy admits, anything like modern record-keeping doesn’t exist. Not only in semi-mythical battles like Thermopylae or Troy, but ostensibly historical campaigns like Bannockburn or the Fall of Tenochtitlan, we must reconstruct events from legend and partial evidence. Battles like Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne’s champion Roland fell, or Lake Peipus, where Alexander Nevsky preserved Russia, emerge from  oral tradition. Ever the careful historian, Overy’s favorite expression is “open to conjecture.”

The Battle of Adwa, 1895 newspaper illustration
Click to enlarge

These battle descriptions aren’t meant to be either exhaustive or definitive. Overy dedicates three to four pages to each battle, regardless of exact circumstances. Gaugamela, which lasted an afternoon, and Austerlitz, which took a day, get equal coverage to Verdun and the Battle of Britain, which lasted months, and Desert Storm and the Six Day War, which were actually single military actions. Overy doesn’t pretend to comprehensive history; overarching patterns matter more than individual events.

But this mix of historical caution and synoptic storytelling defines Overy’s edge. Writing for generalists, Overy describes not only troop movements and map markers, but actual fighting conditions in adverse circumstances. Some armies, for instance, folded for want of drinking water. Entire wars turned on generals’ ability to communicate along geographically dispersed fronts. War, for Overy, isn’t a theoretical command structure (though he cites famed theoreticians like Frederick the Great); it’s dirty on the ground.

Reading Overy’s table of contents, his selected battles seem awfully Eurocentric. Even many non-European battles involve colonial armies suppressing native populations. But his introduction specifies that, while war transcends individual culture, what we call “battle” is distinctively Indo-European in culture. Indian tribal skirmishes and Mogol cattle raids aren’t battles; true battle, with customs of engagement and tactics of conquest, moves out globally with European colonial expansion; without empire, other peoples might’ve never discovered battle’s horrors.

But they did. The Japanese at Sekigahara, the Ethiopians at Adwa, or the combined tribes at Little Big Horn [sic] quickly adopted Western confrontational techniques, sometimes outplaying Western forces at their own game. This adoption of Western techniques to preserve non-Western cultural identity says something about history’s trends— something not everyone will like. (America’s long-running Indian Wars, which only latterly escalated to anything we’d call “battle,” get short shrift here. But that’s my personal issue.)

To his credit, Overy avoids philosophical rumination. The morality of conflicts like Rorke’s Drift or Hiroshima don’t concern him here, only the conduct of competing forces. This fact-based history, reserving analysis for audiences’ imaginations, permits Overy to maintain focus on particular circumstances. He needn’t comment on European colonialism, or racism, or national identity, because this book isn’t about that. It’s about how people fight and die. And sometimes, history doesn’t reward the players we favor.

Besides Overy’s historical arc, this book is visually gripping too. Oxford UP has a history of publishing lavishly illustrated histories for non-specialists, books which audiences can read privately or display, coffee table-style. With at least one illustration per battle (mostly paintings done later, though some photographs of more recent conflicts), this book rewards both casual browsing and thorough reading. I finished this book feeling informed, enlightened, and ready to learn more about history’s open secrets.

The Bloody Flower of Ancient China

Gao Jianqun, Tongwan City

Sometime in the early 5th Century CE, a Xiongnu chieftain named Liu Bobo declared his people a nation, crowned himself king, and cultivated a reputation for remarkable cruelty. As much legend as history, Liu Bobo, who changed his family name to Helian in his glory, spread fear abroad, conquered China, and destroyed anyone who crossed him. But his fame exceeded his person; Helian Bobo’s real accomplishments were lost to history.

Chinese novelist Gao Jianqun’s historical epics self-consciously channel the stylings of medieval romances, but infused with strong praises of individualism and liberty. Though highly regarded in China, with multiple awards and valuable state subsidies, his works remain largely unheralded internationally. This, apparently his first novel translated into English, could reverse Gao’s global neglect; it’ll certainly challenge readers eager for literature that resists hip Caucasian commercializing sameness.

Gao crafts a complex, generational epic combining historical facts regarding Helian Bobo, where facts survive, with ancestral mythology and new speculation. Whereas history recalls Bobo’s cruelty, exceptional amid an era when warfare and savagery were common, Gao charts Bobo’s arc of transition. How, he asks, did one man become so violent that, in times when brutality was commonplace, his extremes became noteworthy? Gao’s answer is complicated.

A gentle child known for his easy tears, Liu Bobo arose from nomadic herdsmen lacking a homeland. When ancient enemies sacked Bobo’s community and slaughtered his parents, Bobo began a years-long trek through shattered Sixteen Kingdoms China, a period of constant warfare, political instability, and lawlessness. Desperate to recover the boyhood stability he lost  in one brutal night, Bobo becomes general, then warlord, then king of all he surveys.

The Xiongnu, believed by some (including Gao) to be cousins of the European Huns, were China’s longstanding enemy; China built their Wall to contain the Xiongnu. Herein, Gao, or perhaps translator Eric Mu, use the terms Xiongnu and Hun interchangeably. Claiming descent from both a Han princess and Xia warriors, the Xiongnu kingdom arose quickly, conquered broadly, and collapsed overnight. Six years after Bobo’s death, the Xiongnu were no more.

Unsatisfied with legends of unmatched cruelty, Gao creates a wholly original narrative of Bobo’s transformation. Born soft-hearted, loving animals and women, his era quickly hardened him when he needed to fight to survive. Gao’s Bobo becomes a general when Chang’an’s emperor, the truest Chinese ruler, invests him with power. But when Chang’an betrays him, Bobo’s learned penchant for vengeance impels him to attack his former benefactors.

Gao’s narrative rejects linear, immersive storytelling favored in creative writing classes. No “willing suspension of disbelief” for him. Frequent philosophical discursions, hops into 21st Century speculation, and broad historical context, keep readers aware of Gao’s consciously created prose. He’ll readily stop whatever story you’ve grown invested in to jaunt merrily down some historical cow path. Gao doesn’t let readers vanish into his narrative, instead constantly reminding us: we’re consuming art.

To achieve this effect, Gao liberally mingles fictional narrative, with its love of sensory detail, dialog, and action, with exposition techniques cribbed from nonfiction. Here, he’ll immerse us in Bobo’s difficult emotional journey, creating the illusion of being there alongside our doomed anti-hero; next, he’ll jerk the narrative away, lecturing bookishly on medieval Chinese history. Though ultimately fictional, Gao’s story ultimately isn’t what Western readers would call “a novel.”

Thus, Gao has two audiences. Chinese readers, and those familiar with Chinese tradition, will recognize elements of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms and other ancient literature. Western audiences, to embrace Gao, will require greater openness to new experience, and must not expect this tale to resemble familiar paperback techniques. Western readers, like world travelers, should prepare themselves for intellectual heft, historic discursion, and some level of artistic alienation.

Maria Tatar notes scientific research that proves readers have difficulty with more intellectually complex novels. It wasn’t just you; that consciously intricate reading you did in college really was difficult to keep focused on. Gao challenges readers, disdains fitting into marketable categories, and creates a novel profoundly, inarguably foreign. Not everyone will appreciate his Gordian prose; airport readers and bedtime aesthetes will find themselves easily distracted.

For the right audience, Gao’s story resists market-driven sameness that has so badly muddled Western reading. His story is daring, difficult, and anything but safe, leading readers into truly distant lands. Gao’s Bobo is familiar enough that we share his journey, but foreign enough to threaten our cozy expectations. And the brutality ringing down the halls of Bobo’s mythological fortress, Tongwan, is shocking partly because it’s so real.

Gunmetal Wizards and Muggle Democracy

Tom Doyle, American Craftsmen

How to review a book like this? Man alive. When I think of Tom Doyle’s brisk, Tom Clancy-ish storytelling, I get tangled on his distracting, frankly discouraging backstory. But when I want to disparage his setting, with its bleak implications for us Muggles, I remember how his main narrative propelled me vigorously along. Doyle leaves me with a hodgepodge of conflicting responses I cannot easily reconcile.

Cpt. Dale Morton, USArmy, wizard and assassin (!), survives a suicide run, forcing him to ask: since when does the Army stage suicide runs? Since his command falls under an all-knowing Pentagon oracle, he realizes America’s military command has a mole. Going rogue, he finds an unlikely ally in an Iranian exile’s pretty daughter, and a foe among Washington’s Puritan elite. Captain Morton must brook no opposition in uncovering top-rank treason.

I cannot deny Doyle’s riveting drama. He mixes techno-thriller canon with allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and more classic American authors than I can name. (19th Century AmLit is my weak suit.) He has the double-time chase sequences and apocalyptic confrontations we expect with airport reading, balanced against smart, well-paced moments of character development, including a nicely understated, guy-friendly romance.

Oh, and what characters they are.

Character surnames seem oddly familiar, which Doyle helpfully explains quite early. Captain Morton, Major Endicott, and Colonel Hutchinson are lineally descended, respectively, from Thomas Morton, John Endecott, and Anne Hutchinson, founding New England colonists and rough contemporaries. One wonders why Doyle doesn’t go whole hog, putting everyone under General Cotton Mather and President Anne Bradstreet. Family dynamics, including surnames, remain unchanged after nearly 400 years.

Moreover, these honored American ancestors were all wizards. They, and their descendents, used magic (called “craft” herein) to manipulate history. A Morton ancestor shepherded Washington across the Delaware. A Morton assassinated Stonewall Jackson, thus preserving the Union. Morton, Endicott, and Hutchinson ghosts re-fight the Civil War nightly in a West Virginia hollow; if the Union ghosts ever lose, America will fall. Screw your efforts; only these First Families truly matter.

Holy shit. Is Doyle saying a sorcerous Anglo-Saxon aristocracy has secretly manipulated American history since pre-Revolutionary times, with George Washington’s blessing? Yes. Yes he is. And he doesn’t mean it in “Freemasons are poisoning the wells” terms; he considers this eon-spanning conspiracy an unrecognized American blessing. This benign collusion has ensured Norteamericano prosperity and peace since before we were a nation. Morton, as Doyle’s mouthpiece, simply anticipates Americans’ grateful acquiescence.

This massive, intergenerational consortium undermines Doyle’s superficial über-Republican ethos. Dale Morton repeatedly boasts his loyalty to the Constitution, yet his very presence in the Pentagon bespeaks anti-democratic inclinations. If a cabal of élite bloodlines makes every important national decision while preserving our very existence, that fundamentally torpedoes the national myth of tenacity, freedom, and Horatio Alger ingenuity. Having smart, resourceful characters doesn’t matter if their greatness comes from their pedigree.

Conservatism doesn’t bother me. Tom Clancy, notwithstanding his often naive trust in technology, was both a conservative nationalist saber-rattler and a cracking good storyteller. But the conservatism perforating Doyle’s ambient background isn’t the highly principled conservatism of George Will or Paul Ryan; Doyle presents a world where everything used to be good, everything that preserves Colonial spirit preserves goodness, and any changes represent some form of decline.

I struggle to reconcile this name-dropping orthodoxy with Doyle’s admittedly ambitious, and sometimes quite progressive, story. Where much “urban fantasy” forever recycles mystery tropes, Doyle’s use of military imagery, including contemporary Iraqi settings, breathes new life into a genre suffocating under its own weight. Coupled with his vigorous, subtly wrought storytelling, Doyle’s front-story has the forward-thinking, even revolutionary, spark of modernity which his backstory lacks.

Doyle pits Captain Morton, a rogue with an intensely moral backbone and suicidal streak, against Major Endicott, a company man who follows orders because he swears by order. The characters circle one another, frequently one coincidence away from killing each other. But while Morton incrementally realizes his mission requires information he can’t access from outside, Endicott discovers damp rot inside the Pentagon’s magical hierarchy. The foes increasingly need one another.

Perhaps what you get from this book depends on what you bring in. Doyle writes with old-school American patriotism so naked, you can practically hear Lee Greenwood over his concluding soliloquy. He still considers America a land of potential and magic. But he also looks relentlessly backward, lionizing ancestral heroes. “America,” for him, is mainly white, mainly male, and entirely Tidewater East. If that’s your America, here’s your novel.

War is Hell On Other Planets, Too

Jason Sheehan, A Private Little War

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War used space opera conventions to explore Haldeman’s Vietnam experience. Not only did the heroes cross measureless space to face an enemy they hadn’t seen; when they returned to Earth, the effects of relativity meant they returned to a world that had advanced centuries while they hadn’t aged. Its classic symbolism unpacked the implications of a war the combatants couldn’t understand.

I couldn’t help remembering Haldeman’s 1974 classic while reading Jason Sheehan’s debut novel, because Shehan does nothing, I mean nothing, that says this book needs to be science fiction. Sheehan serves a slumgullion of images salvaged from better-known authors: you’ll recognize Ernest Hemingway, Richard Hooker, and Tim O’Brien among others. He’s just leavened his blatant rip-off with Depression-era pulp sci-fi images, who knows why.

On distant Iaxo, Commander Ted Prinzi and Captain Kevin Carter are officers for Flyboy, Inc., a contract air force. They fly raids for the human government, which wants to seize swaths of land for human development. They hope to accomplish this by turning one group of indigs (natives) against another. But the mud-dwelling indigs refuse to die. So to cover its losses, Flyboy washes its hands of its pilots just as scrutiny turns to outrage.

I get Sheehan’s intent here. Blind kittens probably get Sheehan’s intent. His blatant parallels with America’s use of private proxies in foreign theatres (we’re looking at you, Blackwater) is admittedly timely as Barack Obama, the Drone Ranger, has unified left and right in outrage. The image of humans as alien invaders conveys Sheehan’s point appropriately; never mind that SG Redling did it better barely a month ago.

Sheehan says “Iaxo was a war without cliché.” Baloney. Start with the airplanes themselves: Captain Carter and his Flyboy pilots somehow fly alien skies in planes that would make sense over Verdun. Carter himself flies a Sopwith Camel, just like Snoopy. His men fly Fokkers and Junkers. Seriously. Biplanes with open cockpits. Sheehan attempts an explanation about public scrutiny and plausible deniability, which confuses more than it clarifies.

Carter and Prinzi march listlessly through the kinds of scenes readers recognize from other books. Sheehan’s story isn’t necessarily anti-war so much as anti-banality. Despite some long descriptions of combat missions, Sheehan, like Joseph Heller, spends his greatest time on the long, dispiriting spells between actions, and the ways pilots stave off boredom. His description of recreational strafing runs feels exactly like a key scene from Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

Sadly, neither Carter nor Prinzi are as interesting as Yossarian or Private Joker. Their actions are so repetitive, so non-dimensional, they belong in a Sgt. Bilko episode, minus the humor. They confront every setback—corporate micromanagement, indig insurgency, combat death—with the same mix of Patton-esque cynicism and stony resolve. Even when Carter’s big secret explodes at the novel’s midpoint, his reaction never varies. These men desperately, fiercely need a beer.

War feels like something that happens to these characters, not something in which they participate. They don’t even show ambition enough for passive aggression. This slow, joyless novel desperately needs a Hawkeye Pierce to call bullshit. Without such initiative, the characters fail to give their story direction; it becomes a novel about passive people failing to pilot their own lives. Maybe that’s Sheehan’s point, but at 480 pages, ermahgerd, that’s long.

And again, why is it science fiction? The science, technology, and alien landscape have no impact on the story or characters. Despite its Iraq War trappings, Sheehan blends images from nearly every American war for the last 200 years. Joe Haldeman used sci-fi to examine war from new, amended angles. If Sheehan had set the story in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, it would make as much sense.

Sheehan wouldn’t need to serve in war, as Haldeman, O’Brien, and Heller all did, to write this book. Stephen Crane and Pat Barker didn’t serve. But they spoke with veterans, studied history, and verified their stories. Sheehan apparently memorized images and scenes from other books, reassembling them into a mess that broadly resembles every wartime book you’ve ever read. It doesn’t feel so much familiar as tired.

To imagine the experience of reading this book, remember every novel about cynical wartime banality you’ve ever read. Remember Catch-22, MASH, The Things They Carried, A Farewell to Arms. Now throw them in a blender with Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates, and spread the resulting jam across nearly 500 pages. It’s about that flavorless, and those 500 pages feel a lot longer.