RAMROD

In this debut novel, a civilian lands a job as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan and discovers that life there is cheap. 

Hugo Maxwell is an Air Force-trained helicopter pilot who apparently likes to roam—he’s originally from Ohio and most recently lived in Houston. He accepts a job working for the Kharma Group—a small, ostentatiously unspectacular company—which was just awarded a military contract that provides NATO forces in Afghanistan with helicopter transport of supplies. The position is superior to his last contract job for a firm that went belly up before he could even collect a paycheck. But Hugo quickly discovers it’s not that much better—the NATO officer he reports to, Cmdr. Rittenhouse, treats him with unabashed contempt, and the ex-Soviets he’s charged with overseeing—a ragtag crew—are slovenly ill-disciplined and barely speak any English. Their self-appointed leader, Vladimir, a “Siberian lumberjack” who flies in his “bedroom slippers,” informs Hugo that their alcoholism is so bad that it’s actually safer if they fly under the influence. Afghanistan is a remarkably unfamiliar place—the author memorably describes it as the “fifteenth century with cars and cellphones.” But the work itself poses the real danger, because the crew members are under the constant threat of attack from a population that hates them. And the military authorities seem cavalierly unconcerned with their safety, viewing their existence as “necessary but extremely peripheral.” The author luminously paints a grim picture of the war effort in Afghanistan expressed through Hugo’s ever-increasing exasperation: “If we’re truly concerned with collateral damage, then fewer people would be killed in a proper campaign of short duration rather than what we’ve pursued for years, an open-ended one that’s guaranteed to spend many billions, kill more in the end, and destroy the morale of our military.” The shattering of Hugo’s former idealism is the thematic spine of the plot: His combination of patriotic ardor and moral simplicity simply crumbles under the weight of the world he encounters in Afghanistan. The author leavens the gravity of the material with a persistently buoyant wit—the snappy delivery of one-liners and the general comedic confrontation with the absurd are reminiscent of the work of Joseph Heller. But Hugo remains frustratingly inscrutable—his idealism is announced at the very beginning of the novel rather than demonstrated, and so readers never discover its source. The most intimate glimpse the audience is given of Hugo is his performance during a one-night stand—his paramour, in response to a query from him regarding her distant mood, replies: “I don’t know…at times I felt you were conquering me.” Readers will sense Hugo’s titillating mixture of restless discontent and resignation, but never approach understanding it. This is especially disconcerting because he is the ever-present core of the entire story. Further, the tale ends abruptly—not just inconclusively but without a sense of novelistic finality, as if Athanas lost interest before readers did. 

An impressively intelligent and funny—if dramatically flawed—story that captures the terrifying brutality of Afghanistan.