THE ICE BENEATH YOU

A well-done land-and-waterborne version of Black Hawk Down, this about a young soldier’s experience of the mission to Somalia and his painful readjustment to civilian life afterwards.

Ben Jones, like many army recruits, leaves civilian life behind with a certain relief. Unemployed, unhappily married, and a new father, he enters basic training at 19 and signs up for the army’s waterborne division, which is responsible for maintaining and deploying landing craft for invasions and troop landings. Ben’s recruiting officer had assured him that it was a cushy post, but he soon finds himself shipping out to Somalia as a part of the 1993 American relief intervention. In Mogadishu, he finds himself in a very strange world indeed, but he’s helped by the company of Trevor Alphabet, a friend from basic training, and Liz Ross, an army harbormaster whom he falls in love with. Most of the story is told in flashback, years after the fact, while Ben is drifting across the US in the mid-1990s looking for rest and work. In San Francisco, he becomes a stripper in a gay peepshow, in Seattle ends up as a dishwasher. But all along, in his mind, he keeps going back to the confused mess that he slogged through in Mogadishu. It was hardly Omaha Beach, as Ben admits himself, but there was enough action to give him nightmares for a long time to come, and enough confusion about what precisely the army was doing there in the first place to keep him cynical for the foreseeable future. But there is something else, too, that haunts him—something he did (or didn’t do) that nags at him until he can meet up with Trevor again and talk about it. Coming home is never easy. When you have a guilty conscience, it’s even harder.

A fresh, straightforward debut that strikes just the right balance between action and recollection.