In a mountain pass in what Ross Ritchell’s characters call “Afghanipakiraqistan,” members of a U.S. special ops team debate the threat posed by a young boy standing on a rock just 50 meters away. He could be a harmless goat herder or could be, as one soldier points out, “strapped with a vest.”
In “The Knife,” a nerve-jangling war novel, soldiers live or die based on informed or snap-judgment decisions regarding potential threats.
Throughout Ritchell’s first novel, as in this scene in a mountain pass in Afghanistan, survival of the team’s members trumps decisions based solely on compassion.
“Kill. Capture. Let go,” are the choices team leader Dutch Shaw offers his men, and they’re based on the bloody backstory of Shaw’s wartime experience. “He thought of guys he’d known who had gotten ambushed after getting compromised. He’d known their wives and seen the kids they left behind grow up after the funerals. Then he looked back at the boy. He’d already memorized his face forever.”
What Shaw says next is what gives this novel its wartime vérité. The scene is riveting because the reader knows so much more about the nearly 11-year-old Ahmed than Shaw and his men. Ritchell, a former soldier who participated in classified special operations missions in the Middle East and now lives in Evanston, uses personal experience to write a novel that paints war as a complicated, exhausting, gut-wrenching ordeal. It gives Ritchell’s story a richly personal and organic sensibility.
When “The Knife” opens, Shaw, who has just buried his grandmother, his last family member, is notified of his 10th deployment. He returns to his squadron, the members of which are now his only family.
Much like the new film “American Sniper,” “The Knife” intimately acquaints us with men who fight for their country. Shaw’s team includes Dalonna, a devoted family man whose wife is expecting their first son. In deep contrast to Dalonna is Hagan, the raunchy-mouthed, sex-obsessed youngest member of the team; Cooke, a compulsive liar whom everyone can depend on; and Massey, the easy-to-like medic who dreams of becoming a civilian doctor.
The men are disciplined, faithful to one another and, while they fear death, they’re not afraid to face it. “They were the knife of the military,” Ritchell writes, “expressly used to hunt down and eliminate terrorist networks throughout the world. And they’d all be out in the night soon enough, doing their best to kill the right people.”
“The Knife” focuses on the team’s hunt for a terrorist network known as al-Ayeelaa, or “the Family.” Their mission is to ferret out this group whose preferred weapon is explosive devices. Most recently, al-Ayeelaa downed two American helicopters, with all lives lost.
The team’s time in “Afghanipakiraqistan,” the name they give to the entire Mideast region in which they operate, is a series of grueling missions that include invading compounds, grabbing terror suspects for interrogations and killing anyone who happens to be holding a weapon. An already nerve-jangling story becomes more intense when it appears the intel that’s driving the men’s hunt for al-Ayeelaa is being manipulated.
In between forays, we learn more about these men. They shoot targets until blisters pop on their fingers, play horseshoes in the desert sand, devour cookies sent from home and watch video feeds of other ops teams performing missions. Throughout, we watch them agonize over their kills and search for the fine line that separates killing from murder.
Some scenes in “The Knife” are so cinematically detailed they will take your breath away. While much of the dialogue between the men is R-rated, the narrative Ritchell wraps around their banter brings home the loneliness and darkness that consume them.
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We never got to know the Navy SEALs who swarmed Osama bin Laden’s compound in the riveting film “Zero Dark Thirty,” but when members of Shaw’s team are killed we know them well enough that we feel their loss intensely. Ritchell doesn’t spare us from awful, visceral images. An improvised explosive device turns men into “vapor and mist” and the aftermath of an ambush is described in horrifying detail: “There were pieces of arms and legs found under and between the rubble but nothing recognizable.”
In 2014, the short stories in Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” were heralded as some of the most authentic wartime writing in our ever-changing post-9/11 world. In 2015, “The Knife,” another literary masterpiece, deserves the same praise for its portrayal of valor and the horrors of war.
Carol Memmott is a freelance writer who also reviews books for the Washington Post.
“The Knife”
By Ross Ritchell, Blue Rider, 255 pages, $25.95
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Ritchell will appear at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court, in Winnetka, at 7 p.m., Feb. 12. Visit the bookstall.com for details.