It can be difficult now to recall the peaks and nadirs that defined each phase of America’s decades-long war in Iraq. The prevailing fatalism of hindsight bias makes it sound like the war was always lost from the beginning. Yet for many, the 2007 troop surge was a time of great hope and confidence that the American military strategy was working. Initial reports from NPR and The Guardian praised sharp decreases in the number of car bombings and overall deaths. There was a sense among many who fought in the street battles with the Mahdi Army militia and other insurgent groups that they were part of a pivotal moment of history. And while debates over the efficacy of outcomes continued until well after The Surge receded and gave way to other conflicts with the Islamic State, the moment is still revered by anyone who dares to remember it as America’s greatest chance at winning a war it would eventually lose. This moment is the premise for Adam Kovac’s novel The Surge and its characters who must find their way through it.
The Surge follows Army Corporal Larry Chandler and his fire team of soldiers through the trials of their first deployment together. While the younger soldiers yearn to prove themselves under fire, he is wiser from having been ambushed on a previous deployment to Afghanistan. When a subordinate asks how Chandler became their team leader, Chandler says, “I was done, I got into college, a good one. Then I got called back up and sent to this armpit because some idiot shot himself in the face.” He carries a drill sergeant’s whistle as a reminder of his friends who were killed in the combat that the rest of his team wishes for. He is the quiet but competent leader who also pressures himself to “Pretend he wasn’t a billboard of the Hollywood veteran with a broken body and brain and no future.” Though the trope is a familiar one, Chandler is a character who contrasts the boredom of war with the wisdom that comes with having lived through it.
The boredom comes with opportunities for sex, trafficking illicit goods, and information sharing that bigger bases functioning as trading posts always seem to have plenty of during any war. There is no shortage of alcohol smuggled in mouthwash bottles when the women from another unit, nicknamed “The Widowmakers,” duct tape one of Chandler’s soldiers to a chair while dancing in their underwear. It’s the kind of erotic fantasy that his soldiers indulge in willingly, even as Chandler himself pursues a more intimate illicit romance with a higher-ranking Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) named Parker. The escapades are more than just an escape from boredom, though. They’re a way of creating whatever connections are possible during an inherently dehumanizing deployment.
While Kovac, a former journalist who now works as a video game developer and lives in the Chicago suburbs with his family, may draw from his own real-life deployments to places as varied as Afghanistan, Haiti, Panama, and Iraq to inform his fiction, he also makes it clear that The Surge is not a memoir. In an interview with Hypertext Magazine, he says, “If I’d taken my own experiences and turned them into a fictionalized narrative, The Surge would be an extremely dull book.” The paradox of dullness during wartime lingers over every scene of The Surge to the point where following Chandler around all day becomes an exercise in both patience and anxiety. It’s an important distinction from the lionized heroism of other war stories and a theme that Kovac has clearly devoted much thoughtful attention to, based on comments like, “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.”
While many war stories follow units of soldiers from all over the country in ways that recall the melting pot metaphor for America itself, the National Guard unit in Kovac’s novel is distinctly Chicago. References to the city’s 312 area code, neighborhoods like Little Village, and the legendary 1985 Bears Super Bowl win add a specificity that distinguishes Chandler’s fire team from so many other stories of men at war. A hyperfocus on detail defines Kovac’s brutally realist prose style when describing the crackle and burn of a seemingly endless chain of cigarettes, the satisfaction of a cold gatorade after a mission through the desert, or flashbacks to childhood summers on the shores of Lake Michigan, writing, “How the August breeze flung sand off the dunes in hunks onto the long gray stretch of beach where he’d wandered barefoot and bare chested with a bucket and shovel, digging for treasure or artifacts and imagining what he’d do after unearthing sudden and enormous wealth.”
The final battle ends up being a kind of betrayal from the high command, who uses Chandler’s team as bait for bigger CIA objectives. At times, it’s easy to misread him as another sad, depressed, physically and psychologically wounded veteran trope that everyone has become a little too comfortable with. He is a true outsider in every way, to his own detriment at times. Ultimately, his mistrust of officers, other NCOs, and subordinates he could plausibly befriend might just be the thing that saves him from the less-than-impressive fates like prison, death, and disappearance that others from his team succumb to after the war. There is no happy few band of brothers in The Surge. Only a person trying to find his way towards something more human than the war itself can offer.
FICTION
By Adam Kovac
Tortoise Books
Published May 20, 2025
