Now that the “surge” is “working,” there appears to be a surge of disinterest in (or outright indifference to) the war in Iraq. Well, leave it to The Virginia Quarterly Review—which, as regular readers know, takes flying leaps beyond the usual literary journal parameters—to get the lump back in your throat, and, if you’re so inclined, the outrage back in your bones.
The Fall 2008 issue opens with a five-part feature titled “The War at Home.” At its core is the mental toll of the war. As Editor Ted Genoways writes in his introduction, “An estimated 300,000 new cases of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] and major depression have been diagnosed among combat veterans in the last four years; during the same span, the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] has hired only 3,000 healthcare workers with expertise in treating those illnesses.” The fallout from this discrepancy are the people you meet in Elliott Woods’ “A Few Unforeseen Things,” about the lingering impact of a 2004 suicide bombing at a chow hall in Iraq on its surviving victims, and the person you meet in Ashley Gilbertson’s “The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce,” a harrowing chronicle of how one soldier’s immersion in the brutality of war led to desperate self-loathing and suicide. (For more on Gilbertson, check the archives at c-ville.com.)
The tone downshifts in the other three parts, but they’re no less salient and insightful. In “When Janey Comes Marching Home,” five women soldiers give a brief account of their experiences in Iraq. “Combat Multipliers,” by Joshua Casteel, who served for eight months as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison, examines the role chaplains are asked to play in the war: “A soldier at peace with killing is more apt to kill,” Casteel writes. The feature concludes with eight poems by Iraq War veteran Brian Turner. In the tradition of the foremost soldier/poet of World War II, England’s Keith Douglas, Turner uses understatement and unadorned details to tunnel under sentimentality. The results are always affecting, though, unlike Douglas’ work, occasionally listless. As a whole, however, the poems are a surprising, potent coda to a multifaceted package that should reinvigorate discussion about the war America has yet to “win.”
In this issue there is, as usual, much to savor within the usual literary journal parameters: short stories by relative unknowns Charles Antin and Peter Walpole, and poems by celebrated poets Ted Kooser and Robert Wrigley, as well as seven others. And VQR is always adept at providing a third layer with material that straddles the literary journal line—this time, most notably, an essay by J. Hoberman on Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd. Hoberman casts on the cultural climate of the ’50s the cold eye that will one day gauge our own times.