Review by New York Times Review
IN 1971, WITH the war in Vietnam ferociously stalemated, David Halberstam published a biography of North Vietnam's îeader, Ho Chi Minh, who had died two years earlier. Books about the enemy are typical in times of war. What was atypical about "Ho" was its fawning tone: "In his lifetime," Halberstam wrote, "Ho had not only liberated his own country ... he had touched the culture and soul of his enemy." It's a pretty lousy biography by any measure, every page a basket of freshly picked cherries, but for many historians on the right it's still viewed as traitorous rot - as if Ernie Pyle had written, in 1943, "Goebbels: A Celebration." Elliot Ackerman, whose five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan left him highly decorated, has done something that, on the face of it, seems even more audacious: Ackerman's first novel, "Green on Blue," is told entirely through the eyes of Aziz, a young Afghan. The lone American to appear in the novel, a Special Forces type named Mr. Jack, is a sinister figure - and the object of one of the book's most cunningly devastating descriptions: "His shalwar kameez still held the creases from where it'd been folded in plastic packaging." The book's title comes from a military term for violence between Afghan and American forces, which probably tells you all you need to know about Aziz's ultimate opinion of Mr. Jack. One can already imagine the response from critics beholden to the imperatives of identity politics: In imagining Aziz's story, Ackerman has committed an act of cultural appropriation. When it comes to judging creative work, identity politics is the revenge of the intellect upon the imagination - the perfect lens for someone who knows everything about art except what it's for. Virtually every artist interested in what's beyond our "tiny skull-sized kingdoms" (to use David Foster Wallace's phrase) is guilty of appropriation. Would that it happened more often; if Ackerman's novel is any indication, there would be fewer wars if it did. Obviously, the war in Afghanistan has been confusing for Americans. One of the most useful things Ackerman accomplishes in "Green on Blue" is demonstrating how confusing it's been for Afghans. In the book's most moving section, an older, destitute man named Mumtaz tells Aziz about life in the early 1970s, before the first Soviet incursions, when Mumtaz's father was a trucker who freely traveled to Isfahan, Lahore and Tashkent. A suite of 1960s-era Afghanistan photos occasionally makes the rounds on social media, depicting lovely city parks, Afghan women in fashionable skirts, packed college classrooms and Kabuli Boy Scouts. This surprises those who know nothing of Afghanistan's relatively recent descent into violence. The Soviets killed a million Afghan civilians in the 1980s, often with brightly colored ordnance designed to attract children. In 1989, factions within Afghanistan's victorious mujahedeen resistance were shelling one another only weeks after the Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban were never merely "Islamofascists" carrying the banner of Allah. They were young men created by orphanhood's privations and deranged by ready access to weapons. This lends a terrible poignancy to Mumtaz's words about his boyhood: "Know these stories so we can remember a way that is different than now." Aziz, too, is a war orphan. Initially pressed into fighting for an American-funded militia, he learns how bewilderingly intertwined it is with the enemies it's ostensibly trying to kill. He fights to keep his bomb-wounded brother safely cared for in a distant hospital, paid for by one of his many shadowy handlers. The mysteries pile up. Militants shell a town only to miss it on purpose. Aziz's commander orders his soldiers to drive down roads he neglects to inform them have been mined by their enemies. As one unrepentant, war-profiting militant tells Aziz: "The only way this ends is if I leave and if all those who wish to fight leave. Peace will not come through us." Eventually, Aziz understands the "true nature" of the war, with its poison handshakes and mudslide loyalties: "It had no sides." The chief pleasures of Ackerman's novel derive from its striking descriptions of men at war. Aziz and some of his comrades are said to smile "the way small men do when they satisfy a great one." When Aziz shoulders a mounted machine gun, "it felt like a man I didn't know was holding a knife against my bare chest." When a gun is pointed at him, Aziz notes the "peculiar itch in my spine" the event occasions. That a novelist with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart would render the sensations of soldiering so acutely is not, perhaps, terribly surprising. Yet elsewhere Ackerman's prose is doled out like meager rations indeed: The "flat crunch" of one man punching another is said to have "echoed down the ravine," which seems drawn from a more sensationalist work, and Aziz describes his suffering brother in similarly melodramatic terms: "His eyes rolled. He breathed, panting." A more difficult judgment to make, if only because of its utter subjectivity, is how convincingly Ackerman inhabits Aziz's mind. I can say that after I finished "Green on Blue" I pondered my own brief 2001 excursion in Afghanistan, among Northern Alliance guerrillas with whom I could speak a bit thanks to my Peace Corps Uzbek. I recalled a magnitude more God talk from those men - for whom "God willing" functioned, essentially, as a comma - than Ackerman allows his otherwise traditional-minded narrator. While Aziz speaks of attending a madrasa, his ruminations on his surroundings often come across as familiarly, even fussily, sensitive. We know this voice. It is the voice of a literary novel's narrator. Whenever Aziz seems altogether too decent to be a young soldier prospering within a brutal war, Ackerman reminds us of Pashtunwali, the violently retributive code of honor that drives Aziz and many Pashtuns. It's unclear how many readers will feel they have additional insight into Pashtunwali's demand for revenge murder after reading this novel, but in Ackerman's defense additional insight might well be impossible. "It is what it is" could have been coined to describe its ancient eye-for-an-eye ethics. Like all novels written in skilled, unadorned prose about men and women of action, this novel will probably be compared to Hemingway's work. In this case, however, the comparison seems unusually apt. Aziz's brother is afflicted with the same unmentionable wound that Jake Barnes suffers from in "The Sun Also Rises": "To be crippled as he was," Aziz says, "takes all of a man." Today, Hemingwayesque notions of honor and manhood are ridiculed - often deservedly - as the luxuries of unexamined privilege (at best) and the abysmal bequests of toxic masculinity (at worst). One could argue that wars are largely fueled by misshapen notions of honor and manhood. For this reason, many of the best American war novels of the last 50 years have been black-comic fantasias going diligently after Cacciato. But Ackerman, who fought there, approaches the war in Afghanistan straight-forwardly. He takes Aziz's notion of honor seriously, dedicating his novel to a pair of Afghan soldiers he knows will probably not read it. While reading the first half of "Green on Blue," I wrote things in the margins like "no jokes," "where humor?" and "kinda po-faced." I think I was looking for a leavening shot of absurdism - the thing that reassures us, as Westerners, that war is stupid, uncivilized and beneath us. Yet somehow we keep waging war in the non-ironist lands of people like Aziz, who I'm sure would enjoy cultivating their appreciation for the absurd were they not otherwise consumed with survival. Elliot Ackerman has done something brave as a writer and even braver as a soldier: He has touched, for real, the culture and soul of his enemy. TOM BISSELL'S ninth book, "Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve," will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When Aziz's older brother, Ali, is hideously injured in a Taliban bombing, the young Afghan must join the Special Lashkar, a U.S.-funded militia, to ensure that Ali is cared for. His brother never far from his thoughts, Aziz learns to be a soldier and dreams of taking badal (revenge) against Gazan, the leader of the Taliban. But as Aziz wonders as he gradually becomes aware of the venality that drives his sector of the war, Is Gazan really the enemy? For this type of war, the Americans don't have a word. The only one that comes near is racket. Our war was a racket. . . . Now the cause is war for advantage, war for profit, not a future. Soon enough, Aziz also learns that this type of war has no sides; it seems altogether fluid as its participants do whatever promises them financial advantage. Can anything break the cycle of such fighting? Ackerman, who served five tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, writes with empathy, authority, and integrity, telling an important story that is at once moving and, in its depiction of the futility of war, deeply depressing. Always insightful, the novel brings welcome clarity to the war in Afghanistan, a conflict that often seems incomprehensible; accordingly, Green on Blue belongs on the short shelf of truly memorable books about war.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Ackerman's debut novel, young Aziz Iqtbal and his older brother, Ali, live in the remote agriculture hamlet of Sperkai, Afghanistan, until a mortar round fired by the Taliban leader Garzan destroys their home and family. Left as orphans, the two brothers escape to the nearby city of Orgun, where they scrape by as panhandlers and transporters in the bazaar, until another explosion leaves Ali legless and requiring expensive long-term hospitalization. Aziz agrees to serve in the Special Lashkar, an American-backed local militia unit, in exchange for Ali's medical care. Aziz swears as well to follow the Pashtun tribal code to avenge his crippled brother's honor by fighting against Garzan. Aziz becomes a trained combatant and joins a unit opposing Garzan. While stationed at the firebase near the strategic border village of Gomal, Aziz associates with the corrupt American military liaison known as Mr. Jack and visits the village leader, Atal. An edgy romance emerges when Aziz falls in love with Atal's ward, Fareeda, also damaged by the war. Aziz is thrown into the maelstrom of deceit, greed, and betrayal as the different factions extend the war for personal gain. Ackemna's novel is bleak and uncompromising, a powerful war story that borders on the noir. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
[DEBUT] Among many recent debut novels by Americans who have fought in the Middle East, Ackerman's is distinctive for being written wholly in the voice of a young inhabitant, presenting the region's perspective in all its complexity. Barely more than a boy when his parents are killed as armed forces rush through their Afghan village, Aziz and his older brother, Ali, make their way to a neighboring city and scrape by until an explosion leaves Ali seriously injured. Aziz is assured that his brother will be cared for if he joins a U.S.-backed militia, run by ironfisted Commander Sabir, who consults with an inscrutable American named Mr. Jack while battling Taliban leader Gazan-the very man responsible for the bombing that devastated Ali. This is Aziz's opportunity for badal, or revenge, and he grabs it eagerly, only to discover that he's trapped, forever beholden to Sabir. As Sabir tries to drag in Atal, a town leader who wants to remain neutral, and Aziz finds himself shuttling between Atal and Gazan after committing a dreadful mistake, one realizes the essential error in American thinking: the war is not about ideology but about soldiers settling scores and fighting simply to fight. Verdict Told in a limpid voice, less fiercely lyrical than, say, that of Phil Klay (Redeployment) or Michael Pitre (Fives and Twenty-Fives) but just as absorbing, this illuminating and original work is highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
A different perspective on America's war in Afghanistan. Rather than examining themes of ideology or heroic battles, this novel sheds light on the microview, seen through the experience of Aziz, of a young soldier. The focus stays on those most affected-fighters on both sides and those caught in the middle. After his brother Ali is grievously injured in a Taliban mortar attack, the only way Aziz can pay for Ali's medical care is to join Commander Sabir's American-backed anti-Taliban militia. An equally strong motivator is the need to restore his nang (pride) by exacting badal (revenge) against those who injured his brother. Many men in the militia have joined for the same reason; their belief in badal makes it a useful tool for keeping Sabir's ranks full. The protagonist is committed but soon notices unusual connections among Sabir; Gazan, the leader of the opposing Taliban militia; and Atal, a resident of a village that Sabir and Gazan are fighting over. Aziz comes to realize the reason the fighting drags on has almost nothing to do with beliefs held on either side. As he understands the truth, he must make some hard decisions about the role he'll play going forward. The young man's efforts to sort out what he's told vs. the reality in front of him will resonate with teens. VERDICT Readers will appreciate the author's honest, direct, and complex exploration of powerful yet hidden motivations for war, especially because of the work's blurred lines between heroes and villains.-Carla Riemer, Claremont Middle School, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Set in contemporary Afghanistan, Ackerman's tale unfolds through the eyes of Aziz Iqtbal, a young man whose brother is wounded in the bombing of a bazaarand who vows to get revenge.The geopolitical situation is complex here because the Americans are seeking to find and neutralize Gazan, the local Taliban leader who's responsible for the bombing. It's natural that they should lure Aziz to help them, and they enlist him in a kind of guerrilla force called the Special Lashkar. When, during a raid, Aziz follows his orders to the letterhe was told not to let anyone out the back doortragedy ensues, and he's forced out of the militia, though he's actually given a new and more problematic job as a double agent. Along the way, he meets a series of characters whose complex motivations muddy the moral waters, such as Cmdr. Sabir of the Special Lashkar, who seems to want to continue fueling the war rather than to seek peace. Aziz also meets and falls in love with a village girl whose life he hopes to protect. Eventually he even meets Gazan himself, who's not at all the monster we've come to expect. The lives of the characters are immensely complicated by the violence and political situation that surround them, and along the way, we witness their wrestling with the compromises they feel compelled to make between their consciences and their desires to perpetuate more violence. Ackerman writes in a deliberately flat style that emphasizes personalities rather than military actionand he does justice to the political and moral difficulties of contemporary Afghanistan. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
