SEARCHING FOR GURNEY

In Estes’ war novel, four soldiers cope with the effects of a deadly engagement between U.S. Marines and members of the North Vietnamese army.

In the summer of 1969, JT is back in Portland, Oregon, after 13 months of service in Vietnam. As he walks down the hallway to his infant daughter’s bedroom, he’s haunted by a memory of a patrol that went bad, leaving 17 American soldiers dead, two wounded, and two missing. His wife, Ashley,has noticed something different about him since he came back: “He carried a sense of danger with him. Like he could explode at any time. Especially when he felt blamed for something wrong.” His friend Coop is similarly traumatized, although his service hasn’t ended yet. Their buddy Jesse “Hawkeye”Collins’ story begins earlier, when he’s busted for burglary in Chicago and opts to join the Marines to avoid imprisonment. Nguyen Vuong is a North Vietnamese soldier who will eventually become a prisoner of war and then a scout for the Americans. All four take part in a patrol in the winter of 1969, led by Lt. Gurney, a young man from Alabama who ends up among the missing. When some of the characters are introduced, the patrol is in the past; for others, it still lies in their future. But for each of them, the patrol becomes an unshakable symbol of a deadly, incomprehensible war. Over the course of this book, Estes’ prose is sparse yet reflective, mirroring the dispositions of his action-oriented characters. In this fine passage, for instance, Hawkeye digs a hole: “It was peaceful in a way, digging and turning the earth. The ground wasn’t rocky and the dirt shoveled easily. He scooped and tossed, and as he began to sweat, he thought about his home and mother and how she used to read magazines to him when he was very young.” The staggered timelines offer readers an almost Cubist vision of PTSD, providing its context while dramatizing its aftereffects. It all builds steadily to the key event, which, by the time it arrives, has grown to near-mythic proportions. The result is an arresting portrait of a single day when everything changed, dividing all else into “before” and “after.”

A cleverly structured story that explores the development of trauma.