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Summary
Summary
It is April 2003. American forces have taken Baghdad and are now charged with winning hearts and minds. But this vital tipping point is barely recognized for what it is, as a series of miscalculations and blunders fuels an already-simmering insurgency intent on making Iraq the next graveyard of empires.
In dazzling and propulsive prose, Brian Van Reet explores the lives on both sides of the battle lines: Cassandra, a nineteen-year-old gunner on an American Humvee who is captured during a deadly firefight and awakens in a prison cell; Abu Al-Hool, a lifelong mujahedeen beset by a simmering crisis of conscience as he struggles against enemies from without and within, including the new wave of far more radicalized jihadists; and Specialist Sleed, a tank crewman who goes along with a "victimless" crime, the consequences of which are more awful than any he could have imagined.
Depicting a war spinning rapidly out of control, destined to become a modern classic, Spoils is an unsparing and morally complex novel that chronicles the achingly human cost of combat.
"The finest Iraq War novel yet written by an American"- Wall Street Journal , 10 Best Novels of the Year
"An electrifying debut" ( The Economist ) that maps the blurred lines between good and evil, soldier and civilian, victor and vanquished.
Author Notes
Brian Van Reet was born in Houston. Following the September 11th attacks, he left the University of Virginia, where he was an Echols Scholar, and enlisted in the U.S. Army as a tank crewman. He served in Iraq under stop-loss orders, achieved the rank of sergeant, and was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. He has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters short story award. Spoils is his first novel.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The horrors of modern war in Iraq in 2003 are vividly described in this debut novel by Iraq War veteran Van Reet, focusing on the deadly connections between a female American soldier, an American tank crewman, and a fervent jihadist insurgent. At an obscure roadblock near Baghdad, Army Specialist Cassandra is a gunner on a Humvee, idealistic and proud of her service. Private Sleed, the tank crewman, is naïve and easily manipulated. And Abu Al-Hool loses a leadership struggle with Dr. Walid, an Islamist extremist. Sleed and his crew have abandoned their posts to loot a palace when Walid and Al-Hool's fighters attack the American roadblock, and Cassandra is wounded and captured by the jihadists, beginning 55 days of torture, abuse, and exploitation for propaganda. Sleed feels guilty that their dereliction of duty contributed to Cassandra's capture. While the Americans search for Cassandra, Al-Hool suspects Walid will have him killed, so he makes desperate plans to avoid assassination and to seek his revenge. Cassandra's POW captivity is horrific; Dr. Walid's final propaganda use for her is calmly diabolical and will have surprising and devastating effect. Van Reet's unsettling tale is an authentic portrayal of combat with its chaos, fear, and the finality of death. It is also a sobering commentary on war's brutality and the burning intensity of Iraq's jihadist insurgency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A literary award-winning Iraq War veteran tells the story of that conflict through disparate points of view, including that of a captured female combat specialist in the U.S. Army (known only as Cassandra), a higher-ranking American officer (Sleed), and an al-Qaeda fighter conflicted about the war (Abu al-Hool). These differences in points of view (and narrative voice), though ambitious, don't wholly succeed (al-Hool is a less than fully credible character, and Cassandra is not fully developed), but it's a unique approach and provides a thought-provoking insight into a complex war. In straightforward, often powerful prose, Van Reet captures the Iraq War as Tim O'Brien did Vietnam. As with O'Brien, the action very often hinges on tragic absurdities. Such is the nature of war. Cassandra's captivity is the focus of much of the novel, and Van Reet captures her experience vividly and terrifyingly. Seeing the conflict through a woman's eyes is a compelling approach and deserves attention.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2017 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
First-time novelist Van Reet trains his dispassionate eye on three soldiers in post-9/11 Iraq: Cassandra, a 19-year-old marine specialist; Abu al-Hool, an aging Afghani mujahideen fighter challenged by a younger leader; and Sleed, an older marine who wears hardened cynicism like armor. Van Reet's credentials-he was an Echols Scholar who left academia to join the U.S. Army after September 11-lend authority to this unnerving tale. No detail is superfluous. Van Reet forces readers to confront a daily existence that brutalizes even the toughest characters. We stand alongside Cassandra, who outside a bunker overhears men gossiping about who among them might have raped a female soldier-someone Cassandra knew but was too afraid to support. We feel al-Hool's grief as he mentors a disciple who reminds him of his son, who was killed on a suicide mission 10 years earlier in Chechnya. We lie next to Sleed in the dirty sand as he's awoken, after a blast knocks him unconscious, by a stray dog licking his face as he marvels, "It'd been so long since [I]'d touched any living creature in a gentle way." The capture of Cassandra connects these three lives, resulting in more death. This war novel with a human heart is powerful stuff. VERDICT Strong language, violence, and death pervade this narrative; recommended for mature teens only.-Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
This vivid debut from a former soldier, about the capture of marines by an Islamist militia, captures the valour, horror and absurdity of conflict Brian Van Reet's assured debut novel begins with one of the best opening chapters I've read for ages. The setting is Iraq, 2003, and we're in a Humvee with three US soldiers as they come under attack. Van Reet makes the moment extraordinarily fresh through the vigour of his writing and his constant turn towards unexpected and intense detail. The scene takes place at night, in pouring rain; the muggy interior of the Humvee is "hot and slimy as a locker room"; and our protagonist, Specialist Wigheard, underslept and wired on diet caffeine, is a woman. The strengths of this excellent book are all on show in these tight 15 pages: the vivid observation, the nuance of its characters, the deep familiarity with the processes of waging war. In 19-year-old Cassandra Wigheard, from the poor white underbelly of America, the book has a heroine who is both vulnerable and gung-ho, resentful of the protectiveness her commanding officer shows towards her and highly attuned to his weaknesses. She worries that the family photograph he has taped to the dashboard of the stuffy military truck -- "continually reminding him of the stakes" -- will weaken his courage. Van Reet, a decorated former soldier who served as a tank crewman in Iraq, clearly knows this world. The contents of the ready-to-eat meals, the struggle to keep weapons free of sand, the needle-sharp pain of shrapnel wounds, the messy business of maintaining discipline over a horny army of near-adolescents -- all are evoked with an exactness and rough poetry. When Wigheard and her two comrades-in-arms are captured by an Islamist militia -- becoming the spoils of the title -- their predicament is described with the same beady eye. And though Wigheard suffers the nightmare of captivity in a lightless cell and the impending prospect of execution, her relationships with her captors are still drawn with nuance and dark wit. Alongside terrible cruelty, there is tenderness, and an almost comic revulsion when she gets her period. "Later I bring the insanitary pad," says one worried guard. Van Reet doesn't flinch from skewering the invasion's cruelty and ineptitude, but his ambition goes beyond presenting us with only the US experience. The story gives us three perspectives on the unfolding action: Wigheard's, told in the third person, deals with the progressively mounting horrors of her captivity. This alternates with the first-person accounts of a tank crewman called Sleed who participates in efforts to rescue the captured soldiers, and that of Abu al-Hool, one of the leaders of the organisation that is holding them. Al-Hool is a middle-aged Egyptian who began his career with the Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan. From a background of relative affluence -- he recalls family holidays to Europe -- he is increasingly troubled by the direction of the militia he's part of. Led by the implacable Dr Walid, they are morphing into a proto-Islamic State, with the same appalling machinery of filmed executions. Al-Hool's storyline allows Van Reet to broaden the book's scope, to humanise the Islamists, and reflect on the origins of their movement. Van Reet broadens the book's scope to humanise the Islamists and reflect on the origins of their movement It feels intellectually responsible for Van Reet to push beyond the world he knows to give us a larger perspective on the war, but al-Hool is an empathic stretch for the author and there is more obvious contrivance about this section of the book. The plot requires a change of heart in him that never entirely convinces, and the self-consciously literary register in which he speaks sometimes seems to belong in a different novel. "I am only of middling ruthlessness," he says at one point. "The oubliette is named for good reason and represents one of the prime truths of confinement," he declares elsewhere, sounding like an Egyptian Severus Snape. It is especially noticeable because the novel's other voices are so convincingly natural. Sleed, the other first-person narrator, shares his experiences of tank warfare with a disarming plainness. An M1 Abrams, he says, "drives like an old Cadillac, one of those big boats from the 70s"; but he cautions against trying to cross a ditch in one. "The tank is so long, it'll pitch down the slope if the sides are steep enough and get stuck in the bottom like a lawn dart." Sleed is inessential to the plot, but his sections grip for other reasons. His comrades' search for spoils of the material kind leads to a night-time foray into one of Saddam's bombed-out palaces. This passage, like many of the book's best moments, is rendered so clearly I felt as though I were watching it on a virtual reality headset. Elsewhere, as he muses on the difficulty of telling the story of the war fairly, Sleed seems to speak for the author as he channels the commonsense poetry of Huckleberry Finn. "There's a certain way of doing it where the good guys become bad and the bad good, and there's another way that I wish I could do where there are no categories." By coincidence, I read Spoils at the same time as the new translation of Boys in Zinc, Svetlana Alexievich 's oral history of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan -- the conflict that first blooded the fictional al-Hool. Both accounts have a similar compelling energy, one that is generated by the painstakingly observed detail of lives lived in exceptional circumstances. Both bear eye-widening witness to valour, horror, violence, cruelty and absurdity. It is eerie and somewhat disheartening to find so many parallels between them. It may not be news that war is hell, but our chronic forgetfulness of the fact makes Spoils feel not only rewarding but necessary. - Marcel Theroux.
Kirkus Review
In a strong debut, an Iraq War veteran tells the before and after for both sides of a brief firefight in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom.Army soldiers Cassandra, Crump, and McGinnis and their Humvee are part of a group guarding a roundabout outside Baghdad in 2003. During a mujahedeen mortar and ground assault, the three are last seen taking shelter in an irrigation canal when the story shifts back two years. The mujahedeen are recruiting in Afghanistan and mulling their next campaign when 9/11 occurs and they embark on the trajectory that will end at that roundabout. The narrative hopscotch continues in pre-raid time jumps tracking the Humvee soldiers and the Muslim fighters, while Van Reet, who served with a tank crew in Iraq, adds a third group, a trio of tank crewmen whose hunt for Saddam souvenirs will take them off post when the call comes to head for the embattled roundabout. The author gives each of the three groups a distinctive voice, revealing the hearts and minds on both sides of the war and how training, stupidity, and fear all come into play. Cassandra, Crump, and McGinnis resurface in the main timeline as POWs in separate rooms of a makeshift prison. It's soon clear that the insurgent leader will use any method to make them serve his propaganda videos, leaving 100 grimly tense pages before the end. Van Reet's lean prose accommodates a laconic style suggesting military reports and detail-rich context fed by a keen eye and memory. He embeds the reader with the unwashed troops in a cramped Humvee, in a dark cell where only screams penetrate, and in the mind of a Muslim fighter with two decades of campaigning, a dead son, a lost wife, scant wins, and more doubts than faith can ease. A fine piece of writing that should stand in the front ranks of recent war novels. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In an article for the New York Times, Van Reet, a veteran of the First Calvary Division in Baghdad and recipient of a James Michener Fellowship, criticized the publishing phenomenon of the "War on Terror Kill Memoir," exemplified by American Sniper and No Easy Day. Rather than complicate the intricacies of death and combat, argues Van Reet, these books directly satisfy the American public's morbid curiosity with body counts. Here, in his debut novel, Van Reet does something different, re-creating 2003 Baghdad and illuminating the confusion, patriotism, and regret experienced on both side of the battle lines. The triadic story unfolds around Cassandra, an American soldier captured by members of the Mujahideen Army; Abu Al-Hool, one of Cassandra's captors; and Sleed, an American soldier searching for Cassandra. Focusing on the internal lives of each character, the author illuminates their individual quests for liberation-physically, spiritually, and ethically-amid the chaos of war. The narrative crescendos toward a bang-up ending involving all three protagonists, with the resolution a distressing commentary on what is gained and lost in the pursuit of victory. VERDICT Van Reet has penned an absorbing novel with an unflinching ruminations on war's ultimate sacrifice, reminiscent of Roy Scranton's War Porn. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]-Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.