Hypertext Magazine asked Adam Kovac, author of THE SURGE, “What is the most difficult aspect of war, contemporary or otherwise, to convey in a work of literature?”
For me, it was the boredom. War is boring. There may be brief moments punctuated by extreme fear, but overall it’s a tedious experience that’s somewhat humiliating. Absolutely no one enlists in the infantry and trains weeks for a deployment to spend six-12 months checking IDs or driving up and down an empty road in the dark.
If I’d taken my own experiences and turned them into a fictionalized narrative, The Surge would be an extremely dull book, one that certainly wouldn’t have taken more than three years to write.
Although the novel does contain scenes of combat, I tried to highlight the boredom experienced downrange. I felt doing so was essential in trying to answer the question, “What was it like over there?” From a craft standpoint, I sought to use the monotony as a vehicle to drive the actions of the characters.
For example, the novel’s protagonist, Chandler, is charged with leading a group of men who, in his eyes, are trying to get themselves killed. Each of these soldiers had a personal motivation for volunteering to go to Iraq and time is running out to accomplish those goals. And because he’s a reluctant leader, Chandler, too, finds himself in conflict with his interests: Fighting the war while protecting his boys.
I think author Elliot Ackerman (Green on Blue, Dark at the Crossing, Waiting for Eden) did a good job of describing this problem in an interview with The Rumpus. When your purpose is war, chaos, how do you accomplish your mission and still keep your people alive? How do you destroy the thing you love?
Put it another way: I remember lying on a stretcher in a combat aid station, watching doctors and nurses and medics trying to save a young soldier who’d been torn apart by a rocket-propelled grenade. And they’re smiling under the surgical masks. They’re genuinely happy. Not because of what happened to this kid, but because they’d been waiting for the opportunity to do their jobs, which they’d never do unless someone was wounded.
If that story sounds nuts, that’s because it is nuts. And when I tell civilians war is boring, most look at me and blink. I understand because it’s a difficult phenomenon to explain at a backyard barbecue. But a novel provides the narrative real estate to illustrate how boredom shapes events in wartime. I felt it was important to take a crack at it.
Adam Kovac served in the U.S. Army infantry, with deployments to Panama, Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan. A former journalist, he’s also covered the crime and court beats for newspapers in Indiana, Florida and Illinois. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his wife and son. Follow him on Twitter @Boondock60mm