“Grief is a practical mechanism, and we only grieved those we knew. All others who died in Al Tafar were part of the landscape, as if something had sown seeds in that city that made bodies rise from the earth, in the dirt or up through the pavement like flowers after a frost, dried and withering under a cold, bright sun.”
The narrator, Private Bartle, takes us from Richmond, Virginia in 2005 to Al Tafar, Iraq in 2004 and back. We