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WORK TITLE: Spoils
WORK NOTES:
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WEBSITE: https://brianvanreet.com
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of Virginia, University of Missouri, and the University of Texas.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
MIILITARY:U.S. Army, served in Iraq; received Bronze Star for valor.
AWARDS:Short story award (two), Texas Institute of Letters. Other awards and fellowships from organizations, including the Michener Center for Writers.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including the New York Times, London Guardian, Fire and Forget, and the Iowa Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Brian Van Reet is a U.S. Army veteran and writer. The September 11th attacks inspired him to leave college at the University of Virginia to join the Army. He became a tank crewman and was stationed in Iraq during the U.S. invasion of that country that began in 2003. Van Reet was award a Bronze Star for valor. Regarding his military service, he told Richard Lea, contributor to the London Guardian: “On the one hand, I view the war as a whole as an evil thing. … It was unnecessary, it caused a massive amount of suffering and there’s something evil about that. I don’t think of myself as evil, but I participated in a bigger event that could be considered evil. I haven’t figured out how to resolve that.” After returning to the U.S. and leaving the Army via an honorable discharge, Van Reet attended the University of Texas and the University of Missouri. He has contributed to publications, including the New York Times, London Guardian, Fire and Forget, and the Iowa Review. Two of his short stories received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters.
In 2017, Van Reet released his first novel, Spoils, which draws on his experience in the Iraq War. Among the narrators in the book are Cassandra, an Army combat specialist, a tank crewman called Private Sleed, and Abu Al-Hool, a fighter for Al-Qaeda. Cassandra is assigned to man a gun in a Humvee with fellow soldiers, Crump and McGinnis. The three are guarding a roundabout near Baghdad. Enemy forces begin shelling the Humvee, forcing Cassandra, Crump, and McGinnis to leave the vehicle and hide in an irrigation ditch. Al-Hool’s storyline tells of his radicalization, his conflicts with other extremists, and his later ambivalence about the path he has chosen. Sleed follows along when his crew members decide to leave their positions to steal items from a nearby palace. The narrative later returns to Cassandra’s story, following her and her crew as they are held a prisoners of war.
A writer in Kirkus Reviews described Spoils as “a fine piece of writing that should stand in the front ranks of recent war novels.” Referring to the character of Cassandra, Booklist critic, Mark Levine suggested: “Seeing the conflict through a woman’s eyes is a compelling approach and deserves attention.” “Van Reet’s unsettling tale is an authentic portrayal of combat with its chaos, fear, and the finality of death,” asserted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. A contributor to the Economist commented: “Mr. Van Reet paints a harrowing picture of the dangers of propaganda and the true cost of ‘collateral damage’. At a time when political rhetoric is exacerbating divisions worldwide, this is a novel with an urgent message.” Writing on the Washington Post website, Benjamin Busch remarked: “The sensory depth and description of place is perfect throughout, as Van Reet draws on his experience to paint the sunburned barrens and the hot claustrophobic interiors of trucks, tanks and concrete rooms. The sentences feel weighed with living under these conditions.” Busch added: “This is a raw study in the ruin of men. It’s unapologetic and confessional, showing the flaws in humanity just below the skin.” Jonathan McAloon, critic on the Financial Times website, stated: “In Spoils, Van Reet has imbued his subject with subtlety—something that it is so often stripped of, both by combatants and the media. One rarely sees a war novel by a soldier with such convincing writing on both sides of the trenches.” Reviewing the book on the Foreign Policy website, Thomas E. Ricks suggested: “In time, Van Reet’s Spoils may become a classic of the Iraq War or future novels may eclipse it. Either way, Spoils is compelling in its brutal intimacy, a rarity in a genre prone to tropes and over-dramatization.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2017, Mark Levine, review of Spoils, p. 30.
Economist, June 17, 2017, “The Death of Ideology; Fiction,” review of Spoils, p. 77.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of Spoils.
Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2017, review of Spoils, p. 41.
ONLINE
Brian Van Reet Website, https://brianvanreet.com (October 30, 2017).
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (June 30, 2017), Jonathan McAloon, review of Spoils.
Foreign Policy Online, http://foreignpolicy.com/ (February 16, 2017), Thomas E. Ricks, review of Spoils.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 10, 2017), Marcel Theroux, review of Spoils; (June 15, 2017), Richard Lea, author interview.
Washington Post Online, https://www.thewashingtonpost.com/ (April 28, 2017), Benjamin Busch, review of Spoils.*
BIO
Brian Van Reet was born in Houston and grew up there and in Maryland. Following the September 11 attacks, he left the University of Virginia, where he was an Echols Scholar, and enlisted in the U.S. Army as a tank crewman. He served in Iraq under stop-loss orders and received a Bronze Star for valor.
After an honorable discharge he studied at the University of Missouri and the University of Texas. His writing has been recognized with awards and fellowships, including from the Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Iowa Review, Fire and Forget, and many other publications. He has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters short story award. His first novel, Spoils, will be published in five languages.
Brian-Van-Reet-2016
Photo by Peter Tsai
Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bvanreet
Literary agent: Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White
U.S. publicity email: Sabrina.Callahan [at] hbgusa.com
U.K. publicity email: AONeill [at] penguinrandomhouse.co.uk
QUOTED: "On the one hand, I view the war as a whole as an evil thing. ... It was unnecessary, it caused a massive amount of suffering and there’s something evil about that. I don’t think of myself as evil, but I participated in a bigger event that could be considered evil. I haven’t figured out how to resolve that."
June 15, 2017
Richard Lea
Fourteen years since the US invaded Iraq, and 13 since he served there with the US army, soldier-turned-author Brian Van Reet remains conflicted about the war.
“On the one hand, I view the war as a whole as an evil thing,” he says. “It was unnecessary, it caused a massive amount of suffering and there’s something evil about that. I don’t think of myself as evil, but I participated in a bigger event that could be considered evil. I haven’t figured out how to resolve that.”
Spoils by Brian Van Reet review – essential insights into the Iraq war
This vivid debut from a former soldier, about the capture of Marines by an Islamist militia, explores the valour, horror and absurdity of conflict
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Van Reet dives headfirst into that contested territory in his debut novel, Spoils, which follows three combatants in the spring of 2003, just as hostilities began. Alternating chapters tell the stories of a tank gunner, a female private, Cassandra, and the grizzled insurgent who captures her in a night raid on an American position. The novel has been lauded by the likes of Kate Atkinson (“harrowing and incredibly powerful”), Anne Enright (“clear, authentic and beautifully written”) and Marcel Theroux, who deemed Spoils’s first chapter “one of the best opening chapters I’ve read for ages”.
As soon as he arrived in Baghdad in 2004 to fight in a tank battalion, Van Reet says it was clear that the war was doomed. “I wasn’t in Iraq very long before I was convinced we were doing the wrong thing,” he says. “Those of us who were at all thoughtful were paying attention to global events and what was happening. It didn’t take me long to be pretty convinced that this was not going to end well.”
From his seat in the tank, sweltering in the 40-degree heat, it was obvious there wasn’t much he could do or say: “When you’re down in the muck or sweating your ass off in a guard tower, you’re very aware that there’s a hierarchy and you’re at the bottom. There’s a chain of command that stretches all the way to the White House and those people are literally controlling your life.”
Born in 1981, Van Reet enlisted young, in the raw aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But he didn’t enlist in support of George W Bush’s foreign policy, or in search of revenge. “I think I joined the army for the same reasons that people ride motorcycles too fast without a helmet or take up smoking cigarettes,” he says.
Studying – or mostly failing to study – at the University of Virginia, Van Reet felt “real life was happening somewhere else; it wasn’t happening on a college campus”, but after six months he was ready to get back to uni: “I actually didn’t like real life that much.”
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Reading Hemingway as a teenager instilled a sense of adventure in Van Reet that he admits played a role in his joining the army. War films had prepared him for tough physical training, but he was totally unready for the drudgery and boredom of army life: “In basic training you spend way more time cleaning toilets, mopping the floor and making your bed than you do rappelling out of a helicopter or any of the stuff they show you on the commercials.”
By the time the Iraq war started, Van Reet had almost completed the two years he had signed up for and planned to leave. But the ongoing deployment kept him on active service, and in spring 2004, he was deployed to a northeastern suburb of Baghdad.
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During the 12 months he spent in Iraq, Van Reet was promoted to sergeant and awarded a bronze star for valour. Looking back on it now, it “feels like something that happened in a past life or in a dream”. Most modern warfare is a remote experience, he says: “You never saw the people who were trying to kill you. You were just on your camp – and mortars fall, almost like bolts of lightning or some natural force. IEDs the same way – you’re driving down the road and there’s an explosion and that’s it, there’s no one to shoot at.”
Discharged from active duty in 2005, Van Reet didn’t start Spoils until 2010. Conversations with fellow soldiers during the inevitable lulls in fighting did, however, shape the novel’s threefold perspective: “One thing we talked about a lot was who the enemy was, what they were like, because you had to imagine them. You never got to sit down and talk to them. You didn’t even get to see them very often.”
While the American gunner and the Egyptian insurgent, Abu al-Hool, are told in the first person, Cassandra’s story is in the third – a reflection of his initial struggle to write from a female perspective. “I’d already tried to write a character like Abu al-Hool years before and I felt like I sort of understood why an angry, 20-year-old young man would volunteer to fight in a foreign war, because I’d done that,” he says. “So I kind of felt like I got that type of character more than a woman who joins the army.”
At first he was daunted by Cassandra, by the feeling he wouldn’t understand her or “get it right”. But his worries faded as he focused more closely on Cassandra as an individual. “I think where men get into trouble writing women is they’re trying too hard to write a woman instead of just a person who is also a woman.”
One part he remains unsure about is reconciling fiction’s need for excitement with the responsibility to tell the story of the war as it really was. As he did with Hemingway, Van Reet sometimes wonders if a child will read his book and want to go to war. “I don’t know. Maybe so. But I can’t not do it.”
Spoils is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £9.74.
QUOTED: "Seeing the conflict through a woman's eyes is a compelling approach and deserves attention."
Spoils
Mark Levine
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Spoils. By Brian Van Reet. Apr. 2017. 304p. Little, Brown/Lee Boudreaux, $26 (9780316316163).
A literary award-winning Iraq War veteran tells the story of that conflict through disparate points of view, including
that of a captured female combat specialist in the U.S. Army (known only as Cassandra), a higher-ranking American
officer (Sleed), and an al-Qaeda fighter conflicted about the war (Abu al-Hool). These differences in points of view
(and narrative voice), though ambitious, don't wholly succeed (al-Hool is a less than fully credible character, and
Cassandra is not fully developed), but it's a unique approach and provides a thought-provoking insight into a complex
war. In straightforward, often powerful prose, Van Reet captures the Iraq War as Tim O'Brien did Vietnam. As with
O'Brien, the action very often hinges on tragic absurdities. Such is the nature of war. Cassandra's captivity is the focus
of much of the novel, and Van Reet captures her experience vividly and terrifyingly. Seeing the conflict through a
woman's eyes is a compelling approach and deserves attention.--Mark Levine
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Levine, Mark. "Spoils." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442501&it=r&asid=ed18f2bc93cf68178acec1d942e25a12.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442501
QUOTED: "a fine piece of writing that should stand in the front ranks of recent war novels."
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508107594518 2/3
Van Reet, Brian: SPOILS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Van Reet, Brian SPOILS Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 4, 18 ISBN: 978-0-316-31616-3
In a strong debut, an Iraq War veteran tells the before and after for both sides of a brief firefight in the early days of
Operation Iraqi Freedom.Army soldiers Cassandra, Crump, and McGinnis and their Humvee are part of a group
guarding a roundabout outside Baghdad in 2003. During a mujahedeen mortar and ground assault, the three are last
seen taking shelter in an irrigation canal when the story shifts back two years. The mujahedeen are recruiting in
Afghanistan and mulling their next campaign when 9/11 occurs and they embark on the trajectory that will end at that
roundabout. The narrative hopscotch continues in pre-raid time jumps tracking the Humvee soldiers and the Muslim
fighters, while Van Reet, who served with a tank crew in Iraq, adds a third group, a trio of tank crewmen whose hunt
for Saddam souvenirs will take them off post when the call comes to head for the embattled roundabout. The author
gives each of the three groups a distinctive voice, revealing the hearts and minds on both sides of the war and how
training, stupidity, and fear all come into play. Cassandra, Crump, and McGinnis resurface in the main timeline as
POWs in separate rooms of a makeshift prison. It's soon clear that the insurgent leader will use any method to make
them serve his propaganda videos, leaving 100 grimly tense pages before the end. Van Reet's lean prose
accommodates a laconic style suggesting military reports and detail-rich context fed by a keen eye and memory. He
embeds the reader with the unwashed troops in a cramped Humvee, in a dark cell where only screams penetrate, and in
the mind of a Muslim fighter with two decades of campaigning, a dead son, a lost wife, scant wins, and more doubts
than faith can ease. A fine piece of writing that should stand in the front ranks of recent war novels.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Van Reet, Brian: SPOILS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921958&it=r&asid=fb3f7783ccc69efa23eada892a907bcc.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921958
QUOTED: "Van Reet's unsettling tale is an authentic portrayal of combat with its chaos, fear, and the finality of death."
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Spoils
Publishers Weekly.
264.6 (Feb. 6, 2017): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Spoils
Brian Van Reet. LB/Boudreaux, $26 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-316-31616-3
The horrors of modern war in Iraq in 2003 are vividly described in this debut novel by Iraq War veteran Van Reet,
focusing on the deadly connections between a female American soldier, an American tank crewman, and a fervent
jihadist insurgent. At an obscure roadblock near Baghdad, Army Specialist Cassandra is a gunner on-a Humvee,
idealistic and proud of her service. Private Sleed, the tank crewman, is naive and easily manipulated. And Abu AlHool
loses a leadership struggle with Dr. Walid, an Islamist extremist. Sleed and his crew have abandoned their posts
to loot a palace when Walid and Al-Hool's fighters attack the American roadblock, and Cassandra is wounded and
captured by the jihadists, beginning 55 days of torture, abuse, and exploitation for propaganda. Sleed feels guilty that
their dereliction of duty contributed to Cassandra's capture. While the Americans search for Cassandra, Al-Hool
suspects Walid will have him killed, so he makes desperate plans to avoid assassination and to seek his revenge.
Cassandra's POW captivity is horrific; Dr. Walid's final propaganda use for her is calmly diabolical and will have
surprising and devastating effect. Van Reet's unsettling tale is an authentic portrayal of combat with its chaos, fear, and
the finality of death. It is also a sobering commentary on war's brutality and the burning intensity of Iraq's jihadist
insurgency. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Spoils." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2017, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480593812&it=r&asid=1efeea2866e94e9385eecbc21429b2bc.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480593812
QUOTED: "Mr Van Reet paints a harrowing picture of the dangers of propaganda and the true cost of "collateral damage". At a time when political rhetoric is exacerbating divisions worldwide, this is a novel with an urgent message."
The death of ideology; Fiction
The Economist. 423.9045 (June 17, 2017): p77(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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AFTER September 11th 2001 Brian Van Reet dropped out of university, joined the American army, fought in Iraq and was awarded a medal for valour. It is impossible not to wonder to what extent his experiences shaped his electrifying debut novel, "Spoils".
Set in 2003, during the early days of the invasion of Iraq, the novel centres on three protagonists: Sleed, an American tanker, Cassandra Wigheard, a 19-year-old on her first deployment, and Abu Al-Hool, a veteran Egyptian jihadist whose brotherhood of fighters has travelled from Afghanistan to Iraq to wage war on America. Pivoting around an attack during which Cassandra and two fellow soldiers are taken prisoner by the jihadists, the novel jumps back and forth in time and shifts between the three characters' perspectives, gradually revealing how each of them has come to play a key role in a conflict they do not fully understand.
Mr Van Reet avoids the pitfall of attempting to write from an Iraqi point of view, instead relaying events through the eyes of his foreign protagonists, all of whom are blinded by their own biases. In doing so, he subtly conveys how the battle they are fighting is a proxy war between opposing ideologies, none of them Iraqi. Consumed with their own agendas, his characters fail to grasp--or much care about--the impact of their actions on the local population. "Spoils" is a timely novel with striking relevance to the current war in Syria, increasingly shaped and sustained by foreign interests and intervention.
As the novel advances, all three protagonists question their beliefs in the face of the brutal realities of combat. Killing someone, Sleed discovers, is "like winning at Russian roulette and having the taste of gunmetal forever on your tongue because even if you win, you lose." Meanwhile, Abu Al-Hool, who has his own moral code, clashes with his "brothers" as he starts to wonder how much truly separates his methods and motives from those of his enemies. Cassandra is under no illusions about the hollowness of army rhetoric, which trains soldiers to "liberate" the Iraqi people by "jogging in cadence to cute little ditties about slaughter". Isolated in captivity, she is forced to assess how far her loyalty extends.
Set over eight weeks, the novel is a nuanced departure from the usual plot-driven war thriller. There are no "good guys" in "Spoils". There are no truly "bad guys" either. Mr Van Reet paints a harrowing picture of the dangers of propaganda and the true cost of "collateral damage". At a time when political rhetoric is exacerbating divisions worldwide, this is a novel with an urgent message.
Spoils.
By Brian Van Reet.
Marcel Theroux
rian Van Reet’s assured debut novel begins with one of the best opening chapters I’ve read for ages. The setting is Iraq, 2003, and we’re in a Humvee with three US soldiers as they come under attack. Van Reet makes the moment extraordinarily fresh through the vigour of his writing and his constant turn towards unexpected and intense detail. The scene takes place at night, in pouring rain; the muggy interior of the Humvee is “hot and slimy as a locker room”; and our protagonist, Specialist Wigheard, underslept and wired on caffeine pills, is a woman.
The strengths of this excellent book are all on show in these tight 15 pages: the vivid observation, the nuance of its characters, the deep familiarity with the processes of waging war. In 19-year-old Cassandra Wigheard, from the poor white underbelly of America, the book has a heroine who is both vulnerable and gung-ho, resentful of the protectiveness her commanding officer shows towards her and highly attuned to his weaknesses. She worries that the family photograph he has taped to the dashboard of the stuffy military truck – “continually reminding him of the stakes” – will weaken his courage.
Van Reet, a decorated former soldier who served as a tank crewman in Iraq, clearly knows this world. The contents of the ready-to-eat meals, the struggle to keep weapons free of sand, the needle-sharp pain of shrapnel wounds, the messy business of maintaining discipline over a horny army of near-adolescents – all are evoked with an exactness and rough poetry.
When Wigheard and her two comrades-in-arms are captured by an Islamist militia – becoming the spoils of the title – their predicament is described with the same beady eye. And though Wigheard suffers the nightmare of captivity in a lightless cell and the impending prospect of execution, her relationships with her captors are still drawn with nuance and dark wit. Alongside terrible cruelty, there is tenderness, and an almost comic revulsion when she gets her period. “Later I bring the insanitary pad,” says one worried guard.
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Van Reet doesn’t flinch from skewering the invasion’s cruelty and ineptitude, but his ambition goes beyond presenting us with only the US experience. The story gives us three perspectives on the unfolding action: Wigheard’s, told in the third person, deals with the progressively mounting horrors of her captivity. This alternates with the first-person accounts of a tank crewman called Sleed who participates in efforts to rescue the captured soldiers, and that of Abu al-Hool, one of the leaders of the organisation that is holding them.
Al-Hool is a middle-aged Egyptian who began his career with the Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan. From a background of relative affluence – he recalls family holidays to Europe – he is increasingly troubled by the direction of the militia he’s part of. Led by the implacable Dr Walid, they are morphing into a proto-Islamic State, with the same appalling machinery of filmed executions. Al‑Hool’s storyline allows Van Reet to broaden the book’s scope, to humanise the Islamists, and reflect on the origins of their movement.
Van Reet broadens the book’s scope to humanise the Islamists and reflect on the origins of their movement
It feels intellectually responsible for Van Reet to push beyond the world he knows to give us a larger perspective on the war, but al-Hool is an empathic stretch for the author and there is more obvious contrivance about this section of the book. The plot requires a change of heart in him that never entirely convinces, and the self-consciously literary register in which he speaks sometimes seems to belong in a different novel. “I am only of middling ruthlessness,” he says at one point. “The oubliette is named for good reason and represents one of the prime truths of confinement,” he declares elsewhere, sounding like an Egyptian Severus Snape.
It is especially noticeable because the novel’s other voices are so convincingly natural. Sleed, the other first-person narrator, shares his experiences of tank warfare with a disarming plainness. An M1 Abrams, he says, “drives like an old Cadillac, one of those big boats from the 70s”; but he cautions against trying to cross a ditch in one. “The tank is so long, it’ll pitch down the slope if the sides are steep enough and get stuck in the bottom like a lawn dart.” Sleed is inessential to the plot, but his sections grip for other reasons. His comrades’ search for spoils of the material kind leads to a night-time foray into one of Saddam’s bombed-out palaces. This passage, like many of the book’s best moments, is rendered so clearly I felt as though I were watching it on a virtual reality headset. Elsewhere, as he muses on the difficulty of telling the story of the war fairly, Sleed seems to speak for the author as he channels the commonsense poetry of Huckleberry Finn. “There’s a certain way of doing it where the good guys become bad and the bad good, and there’s another way that I wish I could do where there are no categories.”
By coincidence, I read Spoils at the same time as the new translation of Boys in Zinc, Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – the conflict that first blooded the fictional al-Hool. Both accounts have a similar compelling energy, one that is generated by the painstakingly observed detail of lives lived in exceptional circumstances. Both bear eye-widening witness to valour, horror, violence, cruelty and absurdity. It is eerie and somewhat disheartening to find so many parallels between them. It may not be news that war is hell, but our chronic forgetfulness of the fact makes Spoils feel not only rewarding but necessary.
QUOTED: "The sensory depth and description of place is perfect throughout, as Van Reet draws on his experience to paint the sunburned barrens and the hot claustrophobic interiors of trucks, tanks and concrete rooms. The sentences feel weighed with living under these conditions."
"This is a raw study in the ruin of men. It’s unapologetic and confessional, showing the flaws in humanity just below the skin."
Benjamin Busch
The canon of veteran literature from the forever wars has expanded beyond the swell of male memoir and Americentric combat fiction. It’s been more than a decade since Brian Van Reet rolled into Baghdad as a tank crewman for the second invasion of Iraq, and he’s had time to think about it. “Spoils,” his debut novel, speaks in tongues, all foreign to the setting, each character a volunteer about to be betrayed by soldiering. It’s a book of inescapable vows and unintended consequences.
(Lee Boudreaux)
The story, though mostly based in Iraq, is nearly absent of Iraqis. The players have all come from the outside. We alternate between three narrators and pivot on a single ambush near Baghdad early in the war. Time leaps between moments leading to this attack or to events resulting from it, everyone scarred or doomed by involvement.
We begin with Cassandra. “She is the most dangerous thing around. The best soldiers are like her, just on the far side of childhood. Their exact reasons for fighting don’t matter much.” She’s a machine-gunner in a Humvee with Sgt. McGinnis, a cautious professional, and Crump, a stereotypical punk. Despite her bravery, she’s wounded, and they’re all captured. Though this is fiction, we have the spectral memory of Pfc. Jessica Lynch to base their plight in possibility. Cassandra is the only character written in the third person, though we see the most through her eyes.
Abu Al-Hool is next, an older Egyptian mujahideen who follows campaigns against Soviets and Americans in Afghanistan, Russians in Chechnya and finally the Americans in Iraq. His motivations are the least sensible, and he’s not a particularly compelling character, though he drives the largest acts of the novel. His inconsistency may be by design. As his own zeal fades, he loses leadership of a migratory band of fighters to a true zealot, Dr. Walid. He begins to worry that the new radicals are too maniacal and the cause he joined has been twisted.
“It is a vexing paradox that the coarsest and most sinful among us often become the most pious: itinerants, nomads, wanderers; young men banished from their homelands, lost to their parents; and older men like myself, strangers to our own families — we were all lost, in the world’s eyes — and yet, at the same time, possessed of a deceptive resiliency, like the new spring wood best suited for fashioning into arrows.”
The third voice is Sleed, a tank crewman who represents the reluctant participant. He finally bonds with his crew by looting an abandoned palace, and their dereliction delays the rescue of Cassandra’s unit. His tank continues in the hunt for the POWs they’ve caused, driving deeper into tragedy.
This feels like a book written after Iraq and Afghanistan have been studied, the lunacy sorted out and the sensibilities of all sides given consideration. It lets slip some wisdoms of retrospect. We’ve met these people in “Generation Kill,” “The Good Lieutenant,” “Green on Blue” and countless other desert war writing about the American at arms — but rarely has actual captivity been explored. This is where “Spoils” moves into fresh territory.
[Review: ‘The Good Lieutenant,’ by Whitney Terrell]
The sensory depth and description of place is perfect throughout, as Van Reet draws on his experience to paint the sunburned barrens and the hot claustrophobic interiors of trucks, tanks and concrete rooms. The sentences feel weighed with living under these conditions. The dust has grit, the heat bears down, and he gets the military tedium right, the sense of constant boredom, toil and impatience. “Spoils” is about waiting for action, and, as in combat, it comes fast when most are least prepared for it.
Author Brian Van Reet (Peter Tsai)
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He also gets at the essential dynamic of each nuclear tribe, the crew of one gun truck, the crew of one tank, a cell of Islamist militants — all of them foreigners to the war they find themselves in, the one they wanted. And yet it’s here that they’ll be defined and transformed by choice, mistake and circumstance. Only the self-obsessed Dr. Walid and adolescent Crump remain unchanged, their points of view incorruptible, their similarity a comment on both.
This is a raw study in the ruin of men. It’s unapologetic and confessional, showing the flaws in humanity just below the skin. The story is built to allow the lone woman time to plan her escape, play captors to her advantage as the tension mounts. She’s the only one who earns our hope.
Every character fears failure, isolation and powerlessness, the American occupation creating a kind of universal captivity. Van Reet shows that no one wins a war like this, and, at some point, everyone fighting in it knows.
Benjamin Busch is the author of “Dust to Dust.”
QUOTED: "In Spoils, Van Reet has imbued his subject with subtlety — something that it is so often stripped of, both by combatants and the media. One rarely sees a war novel by a soldier with such convincing writing on both sides of the trenches."
Jonathan McAloon
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https://www.ft.com/content/c2d69f9c-5b4f-11e7-b553-e2df1b0c3220
After the September 11 attacks, Brian Van Reet dropped out of university in Virginia to serve as a tank gunner in Iraq (2004-2005). He has said in an interview that this was because he felt “real” life was happening there. In his astute debut novel Spoils, one of his principal characters, Cassandra Wigheard, has similarly enlisted, looking for something “realer” than her uneventful American life. A 19-year-old from the middle of nowhere, Cassandra is eager for physical combat, but also sceptical of the xenophobic chants her comrades sing about killing Iraqis. “The army,” she notes, “has distilled and eventually dissolved [ . . . ] every sense of nuance and tact.” But by looking at the conflict through the eyes of three narrators on different sides of the conflict, the novel itself fights to restore a sense of nuance.
Abu Al-Hool is an emir in the Muslim Brotherhood. Having spent his youth taking Soviet heads in Afghanistan and the Caucasus, he now disapproves of the emerging tactics of younger jihadis who glorify in suicide bombings. His “tendency to dwell in nuance” separates him from the generation of extremists that will usurp his. Raised a rich cosmopolitan Egyptian, he uses words like “blackguard” and used to write poetry. Almost half of Spoils is the journal he keeps.
The third narrator is Specialist Sleed, a tank gunner whose looting of a Baghdad palace leads to a late response when Cassandra’s squad is ambushed and kidnapped by Al-Hool’s men. Each narrator’s short sections are relayed in a scrambled chronology, enabling Van Reet to begin urgently but then later recoup background and depth of character.
Novels set in a world of action can sometimes feel agitated; obliged to be always in motion. But this book’s heart is a series of claustrophobic extended scenes of one character in confinement. Alone for weeks with no regular light to orient her, Cassandra secretly exercises, gets used to captivity and tries to avoid abuse at the hands of her captors. She also has to occupy her mind in order not to go mad or lose all hope.
The book is set during 2003, a short way into the Iraq war and a succession of deadly mistakes that will confirm Middle Eastern conceptions not just of American soldiers but of the west. As Al-Hool notes of the occupation, “one unintended effect of this operation has been to prove what we’ve argued all along”.
The action takes place on the cusp of what in the book is the first videoed beheading. This will see one of Cassandra’s comrades “existing everywhere and nowhere at once, memorialised at his worst and finest”. In a sleight of dramatic irony, Cassandra feels relief when, about to be filmed (believing it is an interrogation), she sees not a gun behind her but “just a bare wall with some kind of black Islamic flag on it”.
In Spoils, Van Reet has imbued his subject with subtlety — something that it is so often stripped of, both by combatants and the media. One rarely sees a war novel by a soldier with such convincing writing on both sides of the trenches.
QUOTED: "In time, Van Reet’s Spoils may become a classic of the Iraq War or future novels may eclipse it. Either way, Spoils is compelling in its brutal intimacy, a rarity in a genre prone to tropes and over-dramatization."
Thomas E. Ricks
In his debut novel, Spoils, Brian Van Reet sets his characters on a collision course amidst the chaos of the early stages of the Iraq War. The story is anchored in three interwoven storylines: Cassandra, the captured soldier; Sleed, the morally questionable tanker; and Abu Al-Hool, the aging mujahedeen. As the story unfolds, flesh and convictions are pitted against each other, drawing blood with every inch surrendered.
Typical of war novels, Spoils wields trauma like a machete, trying to cut its way into the human condition. And no character suffers more than Cassandra. Her captivity and abuse serves as a microcosm of war’s disturbing savagery. In contrast, Sleed, a coward and sub-par soldier, is relatively untouched by the war’s cruelties. Ironically, Sleed is the most realistic character with his litany of personal failings. At the same time, one cannot help but harbor a grudging hatred for Sleed.
At its core, Spoils is a narrative of intertwining struggles, with each character bound and trapped by the Iraq War in one way or another. The storytelling is both intense and surreal. Nevertheless, the narrative is limited by its outsider’s perspective. Even Abu Al-Hool, the mujahedeen, is an invader from Afghanistan — attempting to project his own agenda and ideals upon Iraq. At times, Al-Hool strikingly resembles the U.S. soldiers he is fighting against. Meanwhile, Iraq, its people, and the war itself are largely consigned to the periphery. The wider machinations of the war are often brushed away with references to God or “Higher,” military shorthand for higher command. As such, the reader like the novel’s characters is limited to pinhole views of the war, stuck in the messy, unruly trenches.
In the end, Spoils has no heroes, only victims of consequence. This is the novel’s greatest quality, redeeming its occasional clichés. Unlike typical war novels, there are no grand acts of heroism or redemption. From beginning to end, Spoils exists in the morally gray, purposefully blurring the lines between good and evil. In this way, Spoils resembles Roy Scranton’s War Porn, another Iraq war novel utilizing contrasting character perspectives. Both are unapologetic in their telling of the war, often subverting the popular cult of worship around American soldiers.
In time, Van Reet’s Spoils may become a classic of the Iraq War or future novels may eclipse it. Either way, Spoils is compelling in its brutal intimacy, a rarity in a genre prone to tropes and over-dramatization.
Sebastian J. Bae served six years in the Marine Corps infantry, leaving as a sergeant. He deployed to Iraq in 2009. He received his Masters at Georgetown University’s security studies program, specializing in violent nonstate actors and humanitarian interventions. He co-holds the Marine chair on Best Defense’s Council of Former Enlisted. His writing portfolio can be found here.