This collection is impactful, almost viscerally so, but not nearly as politically pointed as it might have been, which I appreciated. There is a certain uniformity of perspective running through the short stories - all of the protagonists are men within the Marine Corps who have served, in some capacity or another, on the ground in Iraq. Once I noticed that I found it a little unsettling, but I suppose the idea was to hold constant, as it were, certain variables in order to sharpen the effect of varying the functional capacity of the protagonist in each story - to really allow us to inhabit, for example, the life of a Marine bureaucrat, or a Marine chaplin, or what have you.

The stories are as a rule immediate and gritty, the reader brought full-force into the daily reality of life in Iraq, the convenient distance created by this highly-packaged war obliterated and nullified. In “After Action Report” that distance is mocked in particularly clever form, with one Marine absorbing the guilt of another’s kill by rewriting its history - in a manner exactly obverse to the manner in which we, as a country, have allowed so many soldiers to absorb our collective guilt for having chosen this catastrophic misadventure of a war.

What’s telling is the exception to these rules around perspective and immediacy. In “Psychological Operations”, we get the longest story by far, and also one which is not about a Marine (he’s a Army PsyOps expert), not set in Iraq or its immediate aftermath (since the protagonist is now a college student long removed from his deployment), not about a “typical” soldier (since he comes from the Middle East), and not even a “typical” Middle Easterner (since he’s an Egyptian Copt whose father hates Muslims.) Indeed the plotline is downright bizzarre, since it is in very large part concerned with the protagonist telling a story, and in fact a story about another story, to an observant Muslim classmate. He might be trying to manipulate her - or then again he might not, the point is a bit unclear - and on the whole, unlike his other comrades in the other stories, he exudes a certain kind of incompetence all the way through. It’s either my favorite or least favorite story in the collection, I’m not certain, but I think the idea is really to explore all of the insidious ways that war weakens the mind, and perhaps, collectively, our conscience as a society. But it’s all a little hazy.