Coming Home 
 The friend who encouraged me to read this book swears that it is not a war novel. I can't think why not. From its very first scene, as a group of US soldiers huddle on as rooftop in Tal Afar in Northern Iraq, red-eyed from a 72-hour deployment, it is grounded in the grit and texture of the Second Gulf War. Even more than Helen Benedict's impressive 
 Sand Queen 
 (the only other book I have so far read about that war), Powers conveys what it was like to serve and survive in that dust and heat, facing an ill-defined and elusive enemy, in a way than no amount of television reporting managed to do. As well he might, for he was there. 
 Perhaps my friend meant that this is not a book about ground gained and battles won. It is a grunt's-eye view, going from day to day with no concern for the overall picture, and surprisingly no heroics. When, towards the end, a major arrives to distribute medals and citations, the exhausted soldiers are too indifferent even to come to proper order. In many ways, this is a small book, at least in the Iraq scenes, which take place in a small area over a short period of time and essentially concern only three soldiers: John Bartle, his buddy Murph, and their battle-hardened sergeant Sterling. But to call it small is to miss its moral implications, which are immense. And even here, Powers' concern is human, not political; he is not interested in denouncing the folly of this particular war, except by implication, by showing the toll it takes on a single serviceman and those nearest to him. Before shipping out, Bartle makes a rash promise to Murph's mother that he will bring her boy home. As we learn early on, he will fail to do so. Shorn of its details, that is the entire story, but it is enormous. 
 One of Powers' most brilliant strokes is to alternate scenes in Iraq with those in Germany and Virginia as Bartle finally comes home. Finally? No, for there is nothing final about the trauma that John Bartle suffers, alienating him from his mother and former friends. But nothing is overstated; these are gentle rural scenes that nonetheless speak volumes, such as one picture of young men and women (John's former classmates) swimming from some rocks while John walks naked into the river lower down. Meanwhile back in Iraq, we come closer to the day of Murph's death, and the events that will so affect Private Bartle and Sergeant Sterling. They are horrible, yes, but no worse than much else we have read about that war. And what John suffers from in himself is not the discovery of some latent brutality, but simply the consequences of his humanity. 
 And that perhaps is ultimately what my friend meant in not calling it a war novel. This is a deeply human book, and also an unbearably poetic one (Powers went on to become Michener Fellow in Poetry at UT Austin). Let me end with a vignette. Murph has taken to going up to the casualty clearing section to watch from the distance a young female medic... 
 That place, those little tents at the top of the hill, the small area where she was; it might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we'd ever know. So it made sense to watch her softly sobbing in the open space of a dusty piece of ground. And I understood why he came and why I couldn't go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever.