Written by Paul Avallone, a veteran who spent more than three years in the Afghanistan War as a Green Beret and then as a civilian embedded journalist, TATTOO ZOO is one of the best if not the best war novel of the War on Terror era.

The novel begins with the Tattoo Zoo, a regular infantry platoon assigned to a combat outpost in a remote valley in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, traveling in their gun trucks to a village in the Wajma Valley. Their mission is to escort two civilian contractors–a bright, lovable young woman and a sarcastic, experienced former Marine–who will interview the locals. As this is a counter-insurgency war for hearts and minds, these interviews produce intelligence about the battle space’s “human terrain”–the complex culture and tribal relationships that comprise local politics in Afghanistan.

When tragedy strikes, the Zoo finds itself accused of a horrific war crime and then in an even worse situation, trapped by circumstance by an experienced, numerically superior enemy force that is hell bent on their destruction. Can they win, or more to the point, will any of them survive what’s coming?

That’s pretty much the plot, though it hardly scratches the surface of this very long–no, don’t think long, think big–war novel. The first thing that drew me in was the voice, which is wry and playful but doesn’t pat itself on the back. From there, it just builds. We get to know a large cast of characters with some depth, showing the humanity of soldiers, and revealing the motivations and thought process of everybody from grunts in combat to the officers and NCOs who lead them to helo pilots defying orders to help people they don’t even know to the top brass trying to control the story. Not every character is likeable, but they all get their say, they’re all believable, and they all influence the story in some way like pieces that add up to a single chain of events that is really a mosaic of people and small events and decisions. I particularly enjoyed the way the soldiers aren’t cookie cutter heroes or victims or earnest hooah types but real people, some who fit the mold and some who don’t. Over time, Avallone leans on the humanity of his characters, offering a solid story that slowly reveals far more literary aspirations.

As a man who served in Afghanistan, the author has a point of view, though it’s not forced on the reader. Instead, he shows the folly of military counter-insurgency policy by offering up a worst-case scenario in which these policies are used against the Americans along with other tradeoffs. The enemy in this book knows what it’s doing, and it recognizes the battle space includes the American media and high command. Despite this point of view, Avallone gives the other side its full say about why these policies are in place. As a civilian, it made me wonder how the war could be won, with the military simultaneously being tasked with fighting an insurgency but with severe restraint to avoid civilian casualties, putting the soldiers at additional risk and with casualties being inevitable anyway in war, casualties that then prolonged the insurgency. Another theme I found engaging was the conflict between getting ahead in the military and doing the right thing.

Then there’s the action, which was riveting. I felt like I was watching OUTPOST, one of my favorite war movies, again. Avallone’s writing ensures you really care if these guys are going to survive this, and nobody is safe. As the siege wears on, there’s a lot of great shifts in the balance of power and use of tactics to push every edge. As a thriller alone, it’s topnotch stuff, though again it’s far more than that. Another thing I loved was you occasionally see a trope common in war films, like a dying comrade, but Avallone reinvents it by making it real, making it truly matter, and making you feel it.

In the end, yeah, I loved TATTOO ZOO. It really put me as a civilian into the boots of a soldier on the ground in the Forever War, it’s riveting as a thriller, and it goes much further to present a highly nuanced perspective on the war that respects its readers as adults. Highly recommended.

In THIS SHALL BE A HOUSE OF PEACE by Phil Halton, a mullah teaching at a religious school in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation becomes a local hero for standing up to bandits, only to be sucked into using violence as a way to end violence. Along the way, we see his students become fighters. In the local language, the word for “student” is taliban.

The story begins with a mullah (an Islamic scholar), a former Mujahid who fought the Soviets in the Eighties. The Soviets and the reforms they introduced resonated with many people in the cities, but in the more traditional rural areas, the people balked at what they saw as a foreign attempt to change their culture, resulting in an insurgency and brutal response from the Red Army. Now the war’s over, the country is lawless and broken and even more impoverished, and many Mujahideen have resorted to banditry. When local bandits beat and rob one of the mullah’s students, he drives them away, making him a local hero. One thing leads to another, and he finds himself engaging in increasingly complex problems and escalating conflict until he and his students finally see no other path than jihad to make not only their village, but their entire country, a “house of peace.”

When I first picked up this book, my first thought honestly was, “Somebody actually wrote and published this?” Either it would serve up virtue-signaling drivel denouncing the Taliban’s founders as evil, blah blah, we know already, or it would portray them as real people deserving understanding, an idea I found proverbially ballsy. The author is a Westerner; even if he chose the latter path, could he deny his own innate biases to do such a story justice?

The answers to these questions are yeah, it’s historical fiction about the origin of the Taliban, and yes, the author at least for me did an admirable job presenting it from the point of view of Pashto/Afghan culture. The result is a story about men struggling on a righteous but increasingly bloody path where I found the characters and their mindset both understandable and alien. While the flashpoint of how the Taliban formed is historical, I couldn’t determine via Googling how much of the rest of the novel is historical versus fiction.

The author is Phil Halton, a Canadian Forces officer who served in conflict zones around the world as a soldier and security consultant. He did an amazing job presenting characters who live in a very different world than most Westerners and have a different morality, while being understandable. The mullah, for example, is uncompromising in his pursuit of righteousness, but righteous in this case means fundamentalist observance of Islamic law. To Westerners, that observance sometimes appears noble, other times strange and even brutal, especially to women.

Overall, I enjoyed THIS SHALL BE A HOUSE OF PEACE quite a bit. I admired its courage and aspirations, enjoyed the perspective of historical fiction that tried to tell it like it is without propagandizing either way, and found the narrative of escalating conflict compelling. In the end, I didn’t like the Taliban any better than I do now, which is to say not at all, but I feel like I understand them better with his story that portrays them as real people instead of comic-book villains.