The awful toll of the Iraq war on both the American side (an estimated 4,400 dead by war’s end in 2011) and, still more sizeable on the Iraqi side (an estimated million dead and two million widowed), is given stark individual focus in Helen Benedict’s “The Soldier’s House” through its two protagonists, American Army Sergeant Jimmy Donnell, who returns from the war both physically and psychologically injured, and Iraqi pediatrician Naema Al-Jassi, for whom the war has claimed the lives of her father and her brother as well as crippled her young son and killed her husband, Khalil, whose death is the occasion for Donnell’s psychic trauma, with how Khalil was his interpreter and good friend.
So devastating, indeed, was Khalil’s death for Donnell that he arranged to get Naema and her son and mother-in-law out of Iraq and transported to the United States, where she suffers an anxious moment or two at the airport when he isn’t immediately present – as isn’t his wife, Kate, who served with Donnell in Iraq and whom Naema had also been expecting at the airport.
But in a mystery whose resolution won’t be revealed until the novel’s very end, Kate has left Jimmy for destination unknown, leaving Naema in the care solely of Jimmy, with whom she has a strained relationship with how she blames him in good part for the death of Khalil.
Further complicating the situation for her with Jimmy is the presence of his two brothers, Patrick, whose girlfriend, Lisa, is perhaps the most engaging character in the novel, and a younger sibling, Rory, who will make for a distressing development later in the novel with his involvement with drugs.
Not nearly so compelling, though, that story line for me as the considerably more absorbing one in which Naema is trying to become assimilated in America and trying to find a job as well as get her son a prosthesis.
Especially engrossing, that story line, in a novel which delivers with considerable force the individual impact of a war which, as author Benedict notes in an afterword, “is almost forgotten today, even though it is now widely recognized as having been unnecessary and unjustified in any way,” something that could be said as well of Trump’s unauthorized war with Iran, which, with its growing escalation, puts me in mind less of the Iraq war than of the Vietnam war, which also started with minimal American involvement and fast escalated into the full-blown quagmire it was to become and which Iran may well end up becoming as well.