Outside the Window: May 27, 2009. New York, New York. Clouds and misting rain.

Inside the Book: 2003. Gardez, Afghanistan. Dust and "one hundred twenty-eight in the shade, sir."

        So far, Mullaney's portrayal of the military has been almost uniformly positive. His superior officers especially are, to a man, tough and competent. At West Point, Airborne training, and Ranger School, they provided everything he needed, both the equipment and the know-how. In Afghanistan Mullaney confronts scarcity for the first time and, though he never says so explicitly, shockingly poor planning.

        He has an Arabic phrase book. The people of Gardez speak Pashto. He can point out the Helmand River on a globe. The riverbeds around his base are unmapped. He knows the top speed of a running camel spider. The native tribes are a mystery. He has only three functional Humvees. A forth, hidden in a shipping container, is good for nothing but spare parts. In order to patrol with more than 15 men, he has to order some of his troops into an unarmored Toyota pickup. He can ask for new parts, of course, but the Army will place his order behind every broken Humvee in Iraq.

        Mullaney catalogues these problems almost without comment. He doesn’t want to seem like he’s complaining, but Afghanistan’s status as the second, or “forgotten,” war clearly bothers him. He also hates the way his patrols, so full of sudden terror and frustration, become nothing more than statistics on PowerPoint presentations in Kandahar airbase. But he reserves his real scorn for the “fly-by” visits from civilian leaders and journalists, noting acidly that the cost of a decent meal is yet another round of the same inane questions (“Do you miss home? Is it very dangerous?”).

        Mullaney may not criticize his commanders directly, but that doesn’t mean he’s without a keen sense of how badly the war is going. He expresses his bewilderment indirectly, through metaphor:

In the heart of Gardez, beneath the old city fortress, a solitary policeman stood in the center of the city’s main rotary junction. He had a waxed handlebar mustache and wore a well-creased uniform damp with sweat at the armpits. His white gloves had already begun to split at the seams. As dust and trash swirled around his pedestal, he stood like a man trapped in the eye of a hurricane. His cheeks bellowed as he blew his silver whistle, and his arms gesticulated wildly like an epileptic mime. None of the drivers appeared to take notice.

That “solitary policeman,” Mullaney realizes, is a stand-in not only for him, but also for his unit, his army, and, finally, his nation. This is the position we’ve chosen for him, and his tools, like the traffic cop’s “white gloves” and “silver whistle,” hardly seem equal to the task.