(New York Times)- “The age of the war correspondent as hero,” Phillip Knightley famously wrote in his book “The First Casualty,” “appears to be over.” According to Knightley, Vietnam was the high-water mark for the self-mythologizing and self-aggrandizing descendants of the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, mowed down by the Japanese on the island of Ie Shima in 1945. Since then, he argued, governments at war have learned to tame their roving journalists; to exaggerate only by a certain degree, many correspondents have become variants of the press eunuchs laconically described by Evelyn Waugh in Abyssinia sitting at the hotel bar writing up the destruction of a hospital in Adowa by Italian bombers. During that war in 1936, indeed, Waugh himself received an actual cable from his editors in London concerning the “heroic nurses” supposedly killed at Adowa. It read, “Require earliest name life story photograph American nurse upblown Adowa.” To which he immortally replied, “Nurse unupblown.” The journalistic stenography of war had already begun.
But what, conversely, of the war literature created by Americans not implicated in the corporate machinery of reportage? It could be argued that it’s a richer harvest. And one could also argue that the most vital literary terrain in America’s overseas wars is now occupied not by journalists but by novelists and even poets: Jehanne Dubrow’s “Stateside,” Brian Turner’s “Phantom Noise,” David Abrams’s “Fobbit,” Nadeem Aslam’s “The Blind Man’s Garden,” the stories of Katey Schultz.
Elliot Ackerman is certainly one of those novelists, and his first novel, “Green on Blue” (2015), staked his claim within the terrain. Ackerman, who served in Iraq and is a recipient of the Purple Heart, now lives in Turkey. His second novel, “Dark at the Crossing,” has as its setting the intricate, slow-unfolding nightmare of that paradoxical country. Based in Istanbul, Ackerman is familiar with the formidably volatile and increasingly dangerous southern border zones with Syria. Much of this slender novel is set in the once pleasant city of Gaziantep — or Antep — whose texture he renders with economical accuracy and with gathering unease. It’s a physical landscape that rarely appears in novels, and Ackerman has learned it well — a twilight world of desolate roads, refugee tents, hordes of scavenging boys, desperados and lethal con men. Beyond it we hear the constant thud of artillery and mortars, a sound “like soda cans crushed underfoot” and a sinister whine of car alarms accidentally set off.
“Dark at the Crossing” follows the attempt of an Arab-American ex-soldier named Haris Abadi, who, after having served with the United States military as an interpreter in Iraq, is now moved to enter Syria illicitly via Turkey to fight with the Islamist militias waging war against the Assad regime. It is of course a common real-life scenario. Using a digital contact bearing the code name Saladin, he makes the attempt from Antep but fails on his first try and subsequently falls in with Amir, an exiled revolutionary, and Amir’s alluring wife, Daphne, who wants to return to Syria for her own reasons. These three sexually interconnected lost souls constitute the narrative’s emotional skeleton. Through a web of murky connections Haris manages to arrange a possible border crossing through ISIS itself (here known by its Arabic acronym, Daesh).
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In some senses, Ackerman’s novel is unusual for a young writer in that it improves as it moves along rather than the reverse. The first third is heavily weighted by flashbacks relating Haris’s life in Michigan with his sister — a studio in Dearborn with a foldout couch — and his time in Iraq dominated by his relationship with another soldier. To my mind, these chop the narrative and restrain its momentum. There are also repeated descriptions and phrases that could have been ironed out more elegantly. Things improve, however, in the last half, as Ackerman allows his tale to unfold more directly and with more uncluttered velocity. The landscape — both ruined and splendidly ancient — also comes more into its own:
“They left Antep, driving until the early winter sun hovered near the horizon. It cast afternoon shadows along the gentle sloping hills of Kilis Province. Where the hills spilled into farmland, herded bales of cotton spread across fields, which would remain barren until the next year. Laboring in the fields, farmers cleared and burned the harvest’s stalks. Here and there flames caught wisps of cotton, and the wisps flashed like fireflies in the day. Up ahead, dangling above the smoothly laid macadam, a single traffic light was strung across the D850. It shuffled its colors to an empty road.”
They stop here at a small shanty by the road, where a teenage acquaintance named Jamil elects to join them. In a wonderful scene, the rest of the younger boys — furious at being abandoned by their older member — attack the car’s doors with their bare palms and then, seen recedingly through the rear window, tear their own hovel to pieces in impotent rage.
The same D850 takes Haris and his group to the ramshackle border town of Kilis, where Daesh has established a clandestine base it can use to sneak into Syria: “From the bellied domes of the grand Canpolat, Akcurun and Ulu mosques, and from the corrugated steel roofs of backdoor shanties, the faithful had built spires, clutching their way upward. Where the D850 fed into Kilis’s smaller roads, the smooth highway came apart like a river feeding a delta, the single strip of black asphalt ceding to riven pathways of dirt and concrete. Ancient pedestrian lanes ran in all directions, their cobblestones too narrow for a car. Flitting in and out of traffic, and up through these tributary lanes, cheap Chinese motorcycles — Lifans, Zongshens, Jialings — traveled past, always carrying more than a solitary rider.”
When Haris arrives at the Daesh headquarters buried inside this warren, he notices at once the portraits of martyrs pasted along the stairwell and is struck how the expressions on their faces, “eagerness mixed with fear,” are indistinguishable from those on the faces of fallen American soldiers photographically exalted on the other side. He is driven to wonder what the Daesh idea of martyrdom actually is, since few outside the group appear to understand it.
“It occurred to Haris that martyrdom was an American conception. When taken in the pure Arabic, shaheed meant something different. The translation wasn’t ‘he who sacrifices himself,’ although that was often part of it. The literal meaning was ‘he who bears witness.’ Standing at the desk, waiting to check into their rooms, Haris considered Amir, Daphne and even Jamil. Watching them, he no longer felt like a voyeur in their war — he was their witness.”
Haris is interviewed by a Daesh militant named Athid, who provides a thumbnail view of the Islamist revolution in Syria and, of course, asks Haris why he would want to fight with Daesh. Seemingly convinced, despite the slight strangeness of the exchange, Athid agrees to smuggle them all into Aleppo with some laborers and accepts the money they have brought. But treachery is the rule in the Syrian badlands. When they are stopped just before dawn by a Syrian Army patrol, their reflective responses to its taunts lead to a terrible end and a realization that Daesh sometimes dresses up as its enemies to weed out false believers.
“Dark at the Crossing” is unusual in that few of its characters are Western — a bold move in a culture obsessed with “appropriation.” Whether this makes them convincing to an Arab ear is hard to say, but Ackerman’s decision is clearly motivated by empathy and a desire not to tell his story through characters thinking and speaking his own language. I commend him for that; he has created people who are not the equivalents of the locally exotic subjects in your average NPR story, and he has used them to populate a fascinating and topical novel.
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