‘The Valley’: A fine new military thriller and novel set in northeastern Afghanistan
John Renehan’s The Valley is both a novel about the U.S. Army and a thriller set in Afghanistan’s remote Nuristan province. It also is very funny at times.
John Renehan’s The Valley is both a novel about the U.S. Army and a thriller set in Afghanistan’s remote Nuristan province. It also is very funny at times.
John Renehan’s The Valley is both a novel about the U.S. Army and a thriller set in Afghanistan’s remote Nuristan province. It also is very funny at times.
I enjoyed it enormously. I think it is better as a novel than has a thriller. Renehan has a fine eye for the etiquette of the Army, as delicate and complex as the rural aristocracy depicted in Jane Austen’s novels. He could have subtitled this book “NCO Business.”
The scene where the lieutenant from the battalion staff arrives at a very remote, Wanat-like outpost to conduct a 15-6 investigation crackles. In his first minutes there, this officer senses something is wrong, much worse than the minor incident he has been ordered to investigate. Reading these pages of the book brought back to me a creepy feeling I had southwest of Baghdad, at the end of a long road that had been IED’d something like 150 times. Unlike the novel’s hero, I didn’t stay long enough to figure out what was wrong. Nor did I have investigatory authority, just a feeling for a bad vibe in the air, the surly look on a red-faced private as he talked about the place.
Here are some of my favorite lines, things I underlined in appreciation, or that just felt right:
–“What happens on the night course stays on the night course.”
–Driving away from an checkpoint along a convoy route on a rainy night: “the invisible outpost fell away behind them as though it had never existed.”
–The investigating lieutenant interviews an uncooperative soldier: “Brydon mostly seemed annoyed by the pointlessness, the typical mediocre bureaucracy of the whole thing. Black had to respect that a little.”
–“He became your squared-away supersoldier, in his own way. Fastidiously organizes, diligent about physical training. Not necessarily a good leader.”
–Renehan is just a good writer. “. . . he purchased a tall can of ‘energy drink,’ which tasted like bubble gum dissolved in cleaning fluid.” And “the aircraft went up into the night up there with the ghosts.” “Merrick was tall and lean, a straight line with angular mantis limbs.”
Only one thing troubled me: Part of the plot turns on local Afghans being able to recognize individual American soldiers. I think that foreigners in uniform, wearing helmets and sunglasses, carrying arms and willing to use them, could be pretty hard to study and distinguish later.
TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images
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