End of Active Service

 

End of Active Service by Matt Young (2024) 292pp

A war novel -- by definition a dark one.  After a few pages I thought – this is a variation on War: As Soldiers Really Live It by Sebastian Junger who was embedded with a military outfit in Afghanistan, but this book is a love story, not creative non-fiction. Young’s view on modern warfare, is captured by the paragraph, “The draft was gone a long time and we were all there by choice – officers wanted to build clout to get into politics; enlisted dirtbags told everyone they wanted money for school but mostly just wanted to get paid to do some goddamned violence.” A cynical (and accurate) tone that differentiates novels set in earlier wars, before PTSD was a diagnosis and after the draft. Brief summary: Lance Corporal Pusey, freshly back in Indiana after two tours as a Marine in Iraq, finds love and happiness. To get to love and happiness the reader must navigate the flashback horrors of Marine life. To get to love and happiness one must feel the horror of the dumpster fire that is the American Midwest for those not in the top echelon; broken marriages, drugs, alcohol abuse, and general dystopia. Young is an excellent writer.  At first, I thought, uh-oh, this guy is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad (the book bogs down a bit with a repetitive literary tropes), but he writes calmly without forced drama about life in a combat zone and I quickly sank into the “suck” with his protagonist as his corps comrades struggle in situations that would be comical back in “world”, but are too often tragic when played out wearing olive drab and toting a machine gun. Navigating civilian life as a 20-something after years of stress is not easy for Pusey but he slowly rebounds -- simply (not so simple) getting through the day. Eventually he finds a path through the domestic maelstrom, falls/fails in love, becomes a father and the novel ends – with some love and a modicum of happiness.