A tough read in spots but it's well written and illuminating. One must admire the fortitude of these physicians. Thanks for the ARC.

Unfortunately, in spite of the fascinating and frequently searing subject matter, I found myself increasingly irritated by this book due to the way it is written. I imagine the author wanted to convey the perilous and chancy, indeed often absurd, nature of being in a war zone by his disconnected, repetitive and fragmented narration, but for me it just didn’t work. Nor was there was much insight into what made these surgeons and medical personnel tick. They are described from the outside with no real effort to get inside their heads. We don’t even learn why they have chosen to be there or what they have learnt from their experiences. The author spent 6 weeks observing the trauma surgical team at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, and admittedly the descriptions are vivid and evocative. The highs and lows, the frantic activity alternating with periods of boredom, the moral and ethical choices that have to be made, all this is well described. But it seemed to me to be all surface with little substance and what could have been a truly memorable account of medicine on the front line failed to engage me.

Book received from NetGalley.

This was a book I couldn't put down, I read it straight through. It was written by a Doctor who was sent to Helmand Provance to see what life was like for the medics stationed there. It was never definitively stated if he was there to work or to observe. The book pulls no punches, it's extremely grim especially since they are also treating the locals, including children, who are caught up in the fighting. Much of it reminded me of M.A.S.H. the movie/book, not the TV show. There are some funny moments and there is quite a bit of "graveyard" humor in its pages. I enjoyed reading about these doctors who treat our soldiers without much of the extras found in the hospitals back home.

This book gives an unprecedented glimpse into life for doctors in Afghanistan, but is unshakably dark, grisly, and crude. While that probably describes war well, I found it difficult to stomach.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing this review copy!

The author starts out by saying that this book was never supposed to be published, due to the subject matter and the way it was perceived to be handled. That only added more intrigue to the story, to me, and I was eager to begin reading.

The story is akin to the book/TV series MASH, with beleaguered surgeons, war all around them, stress, and dark ways to relieve the boredom. There is a great deal of loss of life complicated by military rules and the Hippocratic Oath – beware, as the injuries are horrific and discussed in great detail.

The author is British; so I expected his writing style to be a bit different from American writers. In fact, I even welcomed it, as I look forward to non-American cadences and dialects in books. What I hadn’t bargained for was uneven writing with obscure phrasing. At times it’s hard to understand who is saying what, and there was no deep insight made on the choices the doctors had to make. At the 75% mark I realized I had not really absorbed anything meaningful except that war is hell, these surgeons were doing the best they could, and sometimes there was strangeness (the usual black humor and Christmas in July) to help the soldier’s mental states. The same type of story was repeated over and over again (wounded too badly, euthanized with pain meds/crashing boredom dealt with by playing card games and trying to stay cool in the desert/occasional platitude about life) without variance or emotion.

Somehow this writer managed to make a wartime hospital seem dull. The characters are an amalgam, and so perhaps could not have been made more detailed; but I think it would have been better if he had given a little more detail about why they were doctors, what made this tour of duty different from others, etc.

It’s a shame that such an important subject matter was reduced to an unsatisfying bite of pablum, as there is a need to understand what the military deals with during extended conflicts. Heart of Darkness, Catch-22, and On Call In Hell expressed the story in a more readable and gratifying way. I gave up at the abovementioned 75% mark; something I don’t do often, but I just didn’t want to waste any more time. Great subject – bad handling.