Places and Names

Visiting a refugee camp in Turkey, National Book Award finalist, Silver Star veteran, and LJ best-booked Ackerman spoke with a man whose movements in Iraq while fighting for Al Qaeda mirrored his own across the battle line. Their unexpected connection compelled him to consider what combat means for combatants and what war in the Middle East has meant for us all.

Starred review from May 1, 2019
A memoir of the war you can't leave behind. For Ackerman (Waiting for Eden, 2018, etc.), a former Marine who earned the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart, and so many of the others he met during his return to the battlefronts of the Middle East, there was no good reason for them to be drawn back there other than the feeling that war had given their lives purpose and that civilian life offered no fulfilling substitute. "If purpose is the drug that induces happiness," he writes, "there are few stronger doses than the wartime experience." The equation of war with happiness may jolt readers who haven't seen combat, but the power of this memoir comes from the author's illumination of paradoxes and contradictions that provide a common emotional denominator for soldiers who previously found themselves in wars where they discovered more than two sides. "For a moment we sit, three veterans from three different sides of a war that has no end in sight," writes Ackerman of his bonding with two friends who might have been categorized as Muslim terrorists, one of whom would later ask him to be best man at his wedding. "Not the Syrian Civil War, or the Iraq War, but a larger regional conflict," one in which they discovered "a unifying thread between us: friendships born out of conflict, the strongest we've ever known." Throughout the poignant narrative there is a sense that the Americans for whom the author has fought have misunderstood the Muslims that he has fought against and that the boundaries dating back to the colonial era have never reflected the ethnic geography of those who inhabit the region. A story in which Ackerman made new friends and confronted old ghosts culminates in a flashback to the Battle of Fallujah and his memories of what took place. A profoundly human narrative that transcends nationality and ideology.

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August 19, 2019
“Wars are no longer punctuated by clear declarations of victory or defeat,” writes journalist, novelist, and ex-Marine Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing) midway through this lyrical war memoir and consideration of American military interventions in the Middle East. Through a chance connection, Ackerman befriends Abu Hassar, an Iraqi who fought on many of the same battlegrounds he did—but for al-Qaeda. Through the lens of this unlikely relationship and another with the young Syrian activist Abed, Ackerman examines the scars etched on the landscape, its inhabitants, and those, like him, who came there to fight: for both his fellow Americans and Syrian democratic rebels, he writes, “our wars each devolved into disasters for the same reason: by trying to unleash sweeping change in the region, we created the conditions for extremists to rise.” Memory continuously draws him back to the places they fought: “I am defined by a place I might return to someday, the idea that somewhere on my life’s horizon is a time when I’ll again walk those streets knowing my war is finished.” He brings together a poetic sensibility (imbuing unforced significance into chess games, T-shirt slogans, and other happenstance details) and clear-eyed understanding of the political forces at work in the Middle East. That combination will appeal to fans of reflective, well-honed memoir, and those with an interest in geopolitics. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit.

Starred review from April 15, 2019
In this searing, contemplative, and unforgettable memoir-in-essays, Ackerman, a National Book Award-nominated novelist (Dark at the Crossing, 2017) and former marine, considers his years of service from his current home in Istanbul. He begins with a discussion of the Syrian Civil War and introduces Abed, his close friend, whose life, hopes, and views are a central focus throughout. In subsequent pieces, Ackerman discusses such varied topics as the rise of the Islamic State (including an interview with a former jihadi), Kurdish history, the friends he lost while serving, the paradoxes of military service, and even his teenage skating years in London. Through memories and his present work as a journalist, Ackerman constantly revisits his traumas; for instance, the essay, A Summary of Action, which comments on the terse prose of his Silver Star award report, is an incredible re-creation of what he experienced in Fallujah. Deeply personal yet never losing sight of the big, historical reasons for recent events, this collection recalls Michael Herr's classic Dispatches (1977) as well as William T. Vollmann's voluminous ruminations on violence in Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), and is perhaps the finest writing about the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts that has been published to date.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)