Spoils

Set during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, American author and decorated Iraq veteran Brian van Reet’s novel Spoils (2017) follows three characters: idealistic American gunner Cassandra Wigheard, Egyptian-born insurgent Abu al-Hool, and naive tank crewman Private Sleed. Each perspective reveals a different facet of the Iraq War, and the narrative strands come together when Sleed’s negligence causes Cassandra to be taken hostage by al-Hool’s insurgent group. Spoils was hailed by critics as “an authentic portrayal of combat with its chaos, fear, and the finality of death… [as well as] a sobering commentary on war’s brutality and the burning intensity of Iraq’s jihadist insurgency” (Publishers’ Weekly).

The novel opens in 2003. Humvee gunner Cassandra Wigheard and her crewmates Crump and McGinnis are part of a group guarding a roundabout on the fringes of Baghdad. Cassandra is 19, gutsy, and willful, with an idealistic sense of duty. However, the ambiguities of the Iraq War are taking their toll on her. She sees that the American invasion has not won hearts and minds, but rather intensified local people’s suffering and deprivation. She doesn’t see how the war she’s waging will help these people.

Cassandra is also thoroughly disillusioned with her fellow soldiers, whom she watches with a satirical eye: “The Crump brain, gray matter calcified, frontal lobes shrunken like dried beans to shiver and rattle inside the skull’s brittle gourd. The army has distilled and eventually dissolved his every sense of nuance and tact.”



As the novel unfolds, we learn that Cassandra’s distaste for her military colleagues has deep and justified roots. Her experience in the US Army has been one of constant harassment and misogyny, with the ever-present threat of sexual violence. She has found that it takes 48 hours for “untended men to descend to the level of beasts.” She wishes she could have been “born a part of their little club. Not a wish to change gender, exactly, but that she’d been given an easier birthright to power.” Although Cassandra has escaped the worst violence herself, her former bunkmate Sgt. Williams was raped and beaten. The perpetrator was never caught, and when Cassandra hears her male colleagues gossiping about her friend, “the cruel innocence in how they talk about it” puts her in mind of the way “children sometimes torture each other.”

At the roundabout near Baghdad, Cassandra and her fellow soldiers come under mortar fire from mujahideen insurgents. The combat is brutal and bloody—when the mujahideen attack on the ground, the Americans are outnumbered. Cassandra, Crump, and McGinnis are forced to abandon their Humvee to make for the shelter of an irrigation canal.

The story moves back to 2001, shifting to the perspective of wealthy Egyptian Abu al-Hool. He remembers his childhood, during which he visited all the major cities of Europe—Rome, Amsterdam, Paris—and his early twenties, during which he drifted, working little and achieving nothing. Disgusted with himself— “There’s no creature more abhorrent than an underachieving rich boy”—al-Hool began to seek a purpose and found it in radical Islam.



Al-Hool fought the Russians in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, where he endured the bitter loss of his son Hassan. Since then, however, he has begun to suffer doubts about the integrity of the jihadist movement. He increasingly recognizes that many of the fighters entering the movement now are not motivated by religious feelings but by greed or even bloodlust. “The war on the ground is secondary to the greater jihad: the more difficult, inner struggle.” Feeling that this inner struggle for the soul of the movement has been lost, al-Hool is all the more haunted by Hassan’s death. Furthermore, like Cassandra, he recognizes that his fight to bring his Islamic ideals to Iraq has not improved the lives of the people he came to liberate. Like Cassandra, Egyptian al-Hool is an invader.

The third point of view in the novel belongs to Private Sleed, a young member of a tank crew. Lacking Cassandra’s idealism or al-Hool’s principles, Sleed is an almost neutral observer of the war, even as he witnesses some of its bloodiest moments: the ruin of Saddam Hussein’s palace, the conquest of the Green Zone, and the battle for Fallujah. Although he demonstrates little in the way of values, he does feel uncomfortable when he sees his fellow soldiers greedily looting the homes of wealthy Iraqis. A couple of times, he even tells them to stop. But by the time his path intersects with Cassandra’s, he has given in. He and his crew have abandoned their tank to loot a home when the call comes in to reinforce the roundabout where Cassandra’s Humvee is out of action. They don’t show up in time, and Cassandra, Crump, and McGinnis are taken hostage by the insurgents.

We find them next in separate cells of an improvised prison. They have been captured by a group headed by Dr. Walid: al-Hool’s commander and the very man whose brutality and dishonesty has made al-Hool question the validity of their jihad. Walid preaches a particularly toxic ideology, and he is determined to feature his new American prisoners in his propaganda videos. A nightmarish ordeal of torture and fear begins for Cassandra.



Her only scant comfort is the presence of al-Hool. Despite their very different backgrounds and circumstances, Cassandra and al-Hool recognize one another as kindred spirits, a human connection that helps Cassandra to endure.

Al-Hool has troubles of his own. He wants to leave, but he learns that Walid intends to have him killed. To avoid this fate—and to avenge himself on his would-be killer—al-Hool betrays Walid’s whereabouts to the Americans, and US forces storm his base. After a bloody battle, Cassandra is freed.

Meanwhile, al-Hool has slipped away to Fallujah, determined to die: “I’ve lived past my time, and put this off much too long—long enough to know the hardest fight is the fight against your own anger. Compared with that, this will be easy. This I’ll do without anger. I’ll do it with something like longing in my heart.”