John Bartle and Daniel Murphy are soldiers, no more than boys who signed up from their homes in rural Virginia to fight their country's war in Al Tafar, Iraq in 2005. Bartle's first person narrative alternates between his experiences in Iraq and the year after his return to Virginia. Powers' describes Bartle's increasing sense that although he was the only one to return from Iraq in a very real sense both he and Murphy died out there. Powers speaks with painful beauty of the heat and dust of Iraq, the emotions suppressed as he killed not just men but also women and children, and how the trauma reduced him to a walking ghost on his return, unable to reconnect with those around him, plagued by flashbacks. Powers' description of the true nature of depression is one of the best I have ever read and this is to my mind as beautiful an elegy for what is lost in war as Sassoon.
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