DRIVING AROUND, WAITING TO GET BLOWN UP

A memoir of day-to-day life during a U.S Army officer’s 2005 deployment in Iraq.

A well-known quote attributed to Gen. George S. Patton—“Just drive down that road until you get blown up”—gives Stoneman’s war memoir its title, as well as a sense of the grind of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Aiming to fill the gap between memoirs of elite military units and “sundry pieces of criticism, usually written by observers with an axe to grind but no real expertise,” the author chronicles the mundane, sometimes terrifying day-to-day lives of the artillery unit he commanded as they patrolled the rural Diyala Province in 2005. Stoneman’s perspective is both typical and unconventional: As a captain, he was a cog in the United States’ vast military machine; he’s also British-born and moved to America as an adult. This cultural remove, along with the affection he clearly had for the soldiers with whom he served, make him a fine observer of class, racial, political and organizational dynamics. He tells of how his unit had to defend itself and Iraqi citizens from insurgents, but how it also enacted nation-building policies. For example, he chronicles how plans to install a village drinking-water system foundered due to a combination of military bureaucracy and local politics; key tasks, he notes, were farmed out to contractors to save money. Even successful missions sometimes involved terrible violence; after his unit uncovered a cache of land mines, for instance, Stoneman’s unit killed the insurgents responsible from a distant vantage point, and then watched as a pack of wild dogs devoured the insurgents’ remains. Overall, Stoneman’s prose is crisp and lucid, and even his wry depictions of boredom in the field (“We had run out of things to talk about four months ago, but conversation persisted like the heat”) and Army administration shine with humor and real insight.

A war story told with wit and clarity.