Van Reet plunders ‘Spoils’ of war
When Brian Van Reet dropped out of college and joined the Army months after September 11, 2001, he wasn’t seeking vengeance for the attacks. What he wanted was adventure, excitement, thrilling moments of derring-do. He wanted to step outside of his comfort zone.
What he got, mostly, was boredom. And eventually, a book.
“If you have a writerly bone in your body and you undergo a profound experience, I think it’s inevitable that you will consider writing about that experience,” said Van Reet, 35, by phone. His debut novel “Spoils,” set in the early days of the Iraq war, captures much of his experience: the inaction, tedium, confusion and struggle to understand the enemy. But it was only by going outside of his experience – and again, his comfort zone – that he was able to find his story.
“Spoils” centers on a deadly, bumbling mess of a firefight that leaves three American soldiers captive, their fates to be determined by a power struggle within the enemy’s ranks and the American response.
There are three narrators: Sleed, an observer grunt whose experience most closely reflects Van Reet’s; Cassandra, a 19-year-old gunner on the front lines who ends up in an Iraqi prison cell; and Abu Al-Hool, a battle-worn jihadist uncomfortable with the new digital tactics his cause is employing: “This new generation can operate a computer more proficiently than a rifle,” he grouses.
The story took five years for Van Reet to get right. He had to throw out his first draft of the book, which was told solely from the perspective of Sleed’s group of grunts. It didn’t work. “It seemed like too small of a story,” Van Reet said. So he made it bigger – much bigger. And much more emotionally complicated with the inclusion of AlHool.
“Writing that kind of character wasn’t so much a choice as it was a compulsion,” Van Reet said. “Even while I was in Iraq, I and other people would talk about the enemy. Who are they? What are they fighting for? … The enemy was something that had to be imagined. I tend to write about things that trouble me, I guess. That kind of character has troubled me.”
Al-Hool is written without judgment, but with curiosity and even empathy. “It is a challenging character, in part because it goes against some of what Americans tend to think about the enemy,” Van Reet said. “We have this black-andwhite, us-vs.-them switch in our brains.”
It becomes an even more difficult read when you consider Cassandra, the story’s heroine (insofar that it has one).
“I felt that responsibility and weight to try to do justice to the experience,” Van Reet said. There were no women in his tank battalion, so Van Reet had to do a lot of research and meet with women vets to better get in Cassandra’s singular headspace. And that’s a scary place to be in a dark cell surrounded by armed Jihadists, the only woman for miles, survival instincts kicked into high gear.
Van Reet’s writing walks a tightrope of terror and beauty. A scene of battle reads both like a horror novel and poetry: “The black nylon bites into her flesh, folding veins and arteries into themselves with a warm pain that hurts more than the shrapnel. He manages to get the tourniquet secure. Then is shot and collapses on top of her with all the ceremony of a snipped flower, warm dead weight stifling her cries.”
It’s discomfiting to find so much beauty in the ugliness of war, to swoon at a descriptive turn of phrase for the staunching of blood flow and sudden death. But therein lies Van Reet’s strengths as a writer: He never shies from focusing his poet’s eye just outside the comfort zone.