A true-to-life look at the fallout of combat
Yorktown veteran’s first novel includes scenes throughout Hampton Roads
A tragically disfigured soldier becomes a reclusive creature of the night after his discharge, mastering high-stakes poker games online and in backrooms of casinos. A brief (and rare) perceived bonding with a female player results in a humiliating spurning when he suggests a date. His former squad mates are equally miserable — underemployed, struggling with relationships, adrift to varying degrees without the sustained adrenaline rush of multiple combat deployments. They feel collectively guilty about mistakes from split-second decisions and errors in judgment that cost the life of a popular teammate from Newport News and caused the death, and wounding, of others.
This is the landscape of the first novel by Bill Glose of Yorktown. He’s a veteran paratrooper who has published several poetry collections, as well as poetry, essays and feature articles in literary and other magazines. “All the Ruined Men” includes scenes throughout Hampton Roads and Richmond as Glose weaves interlocking and overlapping stories of the rocky postwar experiences of a U.S. Army squad over a 10-year span starting in 2003. Their squad leader and one member began their service with the Balkan crises of the late 1990s, but the rest got their baptism by fire in the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which rapidly soured after the iconic fall of Baghdad’s “Saddam statue” and a grand offensive became an unpopular occupation.
Most of the squad also
served together in Afghanistan, although one member called it quits after a horrifying training parachute jump gone wrong; his reaction had led him to be deemed psychologically unfit for further service. His return home to the family farm is awkward as friends and family seem to see him as some kind of coward, although watching two men be shredded by a propeller, and narrowly escaping the same fate himself, might have the same effect on anyone. He trades their disapproval for anonymity and a blue-collar job in Richmond, bonding with a terminally ill
woman estranged from her family — but thinking all the while about his squad mates’ ill-fated deployment without him.
Glose’s writing is superbly gritty and rings true, from the men’s nonstop, off-color ribbing of one another to the classic boredom-to-terror-andback nature of combat, to their inability to keep it together at the memorial service in Newport News of a buddy blown up at a checkpoint. The denouement of that day is an ugly barroom brawl with some local shipbuilders and one member’s glaring inability to step up as a husband and
new father. The soldiers’ stories overlap and intertwine, at times with flashbacks, and Glose jumps from first-person thoughts to second-person narratives quickly, so the reader must be alert to whom he’s talking about and when.
Not only do the men’s stories ring true, but they also are the type we all should read and ponder before committing our young men and women to the next war. Glose shows us that it’s not just buildings and military vehicles that are ruined, but potentially the survivors as well. Time (and possibly more therapy than these men seem to have gotten) may ease the transition of these characters, but they may never stop dreading their phones’ alerting them to a suicide among them.
“All the Ruined Men” is a must-read for anyone, and local readers will especially savor the shout-outs to Hampton Roads settings.
Raymond Leach, a retired Marine, lives in Virginia Beach.
AN EXCERPT
Read or listen to “In the
Early, Cocksure Days: IRAQ, 2003” — a selection from Bill Glose’s “All the Ruined Men” — at tinyurl.com/RuinedMen