Adrian Bonenberger

THE ROAD AHEAD: FICTION FROM THE FOREVER WAR was a book I'd looked forward to with keen anticipation, mostly because I'd already read a few other collections of veterans' writing which were, for the most part, very good. The first was FIRE AND FORGET. Then there were INCOMING, SEE ME FOR WHO I AM, and RETIRE THE COLORS. With any collection of writers possessing varying degrees of talent, however, some pieces will be better than others, and that is definitely the case with THE ROAD AHEAD. There are twenty-five stories here. Some of them shine and some don't. A few are definite clinkers. The book's title comes from a line in the first story, Brandon Willits's "Winter on the Rim," a rather bland offering about Joyce, a young widow living in a remote cabin, still grief-stricken over the loss of her Forest Service husband, who died fighting a fire in Idaho. Driving a treacherous mountain road in a snow storm, "She focused on the road ahead ..."

As the title phrase indicates, many of the stories here involve war-damaged men and women, trying to figure out how they will cope with an often frightening and uncertain future. Kayla Williams's "There's Always One," gives us Kate, a newly widowed soldier - her husband killed in combat - struggling to find her place back home, everything changed. And there's Camille, in Lauren Kay Halloran's "Operation Slut," just back from Afghanistan, where female soldiers were casually labeled as a bitch, whore, or 'Desert Queen.' Following a failed long-distance relationship, she can't quite bring herself to get back in the game. After dressing herself all up to go out, she just can't do it -

"Tonight she would fall asleep in silence. Alone. But she had plenty of time. She would try again. Maybe it would help. Maybe it wouldn't. Maybe she'd find out tomorrow."

My favorite of the stories from the distaff side was Teresa Fazio's "Little." The nameless narrator is the mortuary affairs officer, a woman small in stature, but tough as nails, who teaches martial arts on the side. Like Halloran's Camille, she learned early that "If you a woman in the Marine Corps, you either a bitch, a dyke, or a 'ho'." Now past thirty, we learn how she lost her virginity at fourteen. As an older, single Marine officer, she's been pegged as "hopelessly butch." She finds herself attracted to a man nearly ten years younger, a lieutenant she calls 'Little.' Considering him, she thinks, "I hope I don't break him. I don't know what I would do or whom I would call if I broke him."

Elliot Ackerman's "Two Grenades" gives us a close look at the importance of the much coveted "combat action ribbon," and the twisted lengths to which a man might go to earn it. Brandon Caro's "The Morgan House" takes us inside a stateside rehab facility for 'Wounded Warriors' in which a medical corpsman just back from Afghanistan spontaneously bonds with a despondent triple amputee. "3x5" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff provides the dark humor and empathy shown by his comrades when a man receives a 'Dear John.' Matthew J. Hefti's "We Put a Man in a Tree" gives us a veteran pursued by ghosts, tortured by doubt and thoughts of suicide. "Into the Land of Dogs," by Benjamin Busch (who also provided the book's charcoal illustrations and the cover photo), is perhaps one of the best of the lot here, with its surreal, delusional portrayal of a man who is the lone survivor of a helicopter crash near Kandahar, brought back to a hospital in Texas -

"He escaped the day they brought him to the recovery ward ... Texas was like the flat provinces of Afghanistan, its routes laid through dust like Highway 1 between Kandahar and Kabul. Similar enough that he may never have left. How would he know? San Antonio before he deployed or after or in between. They said he was home, but no one had proved it."

The nameless crash survivor roams by night through a devastated, ruined landscape, raiding deserted stores with spoiled goods, hiding in wrecked vehicles in junkyards populated by packs of ravenous dogs, flashing back repeatedly to visions of his dead pilot, a headless flayed corpse, the copilot burned alive. Texas or Afghanistan? Borders and places, friend and foe, all blur in his mind. "He wasn't looking for anyplace on earth. He was searching for a way back into the sky." Dystopian, hallucinatory. Good stuff.

Maurice Emerson Decaul's "Death of Time" is told through the eyes of a teenage girl captured and made a sex slave by "the Outsiders ... Black shirts, black pants and black head wraps." I was reminded of Margaret Atwood's THE HANDMAIDEN'S TALE. Adrian Bonenberger's "American Fapper" takes us into the disturbed mind of a Navy SEAL sniper. And Brian Castner's "The Wild Hunt" spoofs the war stories of the comic book world of Sgt Rock, GI Joe, with echoes of Steve Austin aka the Six Million Dollar Man.

There are high spots and lows in this rather uneven collection of stories, but I read all twenty-five of them. Several were top notch, a few were kinda blah, and some were real slogs. So here's my best advice: read the good ones and skip the ones that don't work. (three and a half stars)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (lisätietoja)

I am a fan of military memoirs, providing they are well-written and sincere, so I was eager to read Adrian Bonenberger's AFGHAN POST. And the writing is generally good and the sincerity is there too. Yet I had trouble relating to the overall tone of Bonenberger's letters and journal entries. I suspect it's because our backgrounds are so completely different. A Yale graduate before he signed up for Army OCS, Bonenberger obviously came from a life of privilege, ease and 'entitlement.' His writing displays an innate feeling of superiority whether he realizes it or not, an attitude that could easily be off-putting, and often is. A voracious reader (he was an English major at Yale), Bonenberger's notes and letters often attempt to 'intellectualize' all of his various experiences, from his myriad military training courses to his relationships with women. This results in overanalyzing everything, which can often end up being annoying and even boring. I found myself often skimming over his detailed 'instructive' explanations of his training and/or convoluted feelings for his current girl friend. And yet there are flashes of insight not often found in military memoirs, such as his comments about the off-color blue humor so common among soldiers -

"Some of the jokes about women and sex are appalling, indefensible - and it seems like one of the few places (the infantry is all male) that young psychopaths feel comfortable dehumanizing, really HATing women ... I'm not saying that everyone in the infantry is a psychopath, just that they tend to be the loudest; and everyone else just tends to go along with the flow ... [but] I notice it, and it is present, undeniably ... everyone can bond over the one thing that keeps us together and sets us apart - our sexual identity. Imagine that."

Comments like this show that Bonenberger is indeed a sensitive individual, a soldier who actually thinks. In fact his reasons for enlisting in the army were high-minded and idealistic. He was shocked by the abuses of Abu Ghraib, but he was also was fascinated by the idea of his being a 'rebel,' one who refused to take the expected post-graduate path to law school and partnerships. He wanted to try to make a difference in the all-volunteer army; and he also wanted to test himself. And he certainly succeeded in the training phases, completing BCT, OCS, IOBC, Airborne, Ranger and RSLC - well over a year spent in all of these physically, mentally and emotionally demanding courses. And then he deployed to Afghanistan where he served mainly in an admin position as an Executive Officer (XO) for an infantry company. Then back to Fort Benning for more training, followed by another tour in Afghanistan where he finally commanded a rifle company, an experience that nearly broke him, one that certainly destroyed his confidence. In fact I thought the last fifty pages or so here were the best, the most genuine and moving, of the whole book. And the fact that there is no real conclusion, other than that the author knew he had to leave the army, was quite realistic.

Obviously my feelings on AFGHAN POST are mixed. I wanted very much to like this book, but I found its tone - one of smugness, wealth and privilege, whether conscious or not - to be off-putting and completely foreign to my own army experiences. I spent eight years in the enlisted ranks, but I went in right out of high school, from a small town Midwest background, solidly middle class. And the constant over-analyzing and 'intellectualizing' became to me not only annoying, but often boring, and I often skim-read these parts.

But here's what I did like. After the army I did go to college and I majored in English. So I loved the numerous references to what Bonenberger was reading and what he thought of it. I kept a running list and ended up with close to three dozen book titles. They ranged from THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, Hemingway, Heinlein, Melville and Conrad to more contemporary titles from Denis Johnson, Michael Herr, Vonegut, Tim O'Brien, and others. He also read The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire and Rolling Stone - odd choices for a combat zone where escapist lit and porn are often the norm.

A couple years ago I read another military memoir I enjoyed very much, Patrick Hennessey's THE JUNIOR OFFICERS' READING CLUB. Hennessey's book, while a fascinating record of his tours as a British officer in the current war zones, did not deliver on its title as far as books go. I think I came away with only one useful title, a WWII novel called ICE COLD IN ALEX (loved that book). Bonenberger's book, on the other hand, delivered a bonanza of titles for a booklover like me. So I'll recommend it, albeit with reservations. And I will be most interested in what Mr. Bonenberger might write next, because I know he WILL keep writing, and in that I wish him nothing but the best.… (lisätietoja)