A Leader Rebuilds Himself By Michael Moritz

Memorial Day celebrates fallen, rather than rebuilt, leaders but a new novel - “Anatomy of a Soldier” by Harry Parker – inspiringly dwells on the latter. The conflicts of the 20th century produced many vivid and distinctive accounts of war, from the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon through the novels of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer to those of Tim O’Brien and Karl Marlantes. Yet the sorry imbroglio that is the past quarter-century in the Middle East has so far produced little that seems lasting. To the list of worthy contenders, we can now add Parker’s new book.
The son of a British general (who, for a brief period after the firing of Stanley McChrystal, commanded all Allied forces in Afghanistan), Mr. Parker served tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009, in central Helmand, he stepped on a booby trap. In any earlier war, he would have died then and there—in the helicopter his heart was restarted five times in the 18 minutes it took to reach the hospital. He lost a leg and a finger to the blast and his other leg to infection. A lengthy rehabilitation followed and, thanks to prosthetic legs and ferocious grit, Mr. Parker has rebuilt his life.
“Anatomy of a Soldier” is a harrowing account of a young British officer, Capt. Tom Barnes, who is blown to bits in Afghanistan and then stitched back together again. Mr. Parker made an unusual decision for his debut novel; he retells Barnes’s ordeal through 45 objects that play a part in the young soldier’s wounding and recovery. This can be disconcerting at first. The opening vignette is of a surgical bandage, and the reader struggles to identify it. But the technique gains steam and gives this highly autobiographical work a welcome degree of detachment.
Mr. Parker builds connections between the objects that dismember the young officer and those that help rebuild him. Some are merely the mundane impedimenta of war: the boots worn by Barnes or the aerial photographs and night vision goggles he uses to target the locations of suspected Taliban. More ominous are the innocuous items of enemy lives: the handmade rug that lies on the dusty floor of one perpetrator’s home; the fake, knock-off sneakers worn by another. Then there are the components of the bomb—all readily obtainable and, with crude training, quickly converted into deadly devices. There’s the sack of fertilizer that, when wreathed in petroleum-soaked rags, wrapped in plastic and bound in duct tape, can be triggered by a cheap cell phone and will blow a man to pieces.
While Mr. Parker is unsparing in building up to the moment when Barnes is nearly killed, it is his portrayal of what follows that will absorb most readers. This is one of the most intimate and detailed accounts of a wounded soldier’s recovery ever committed to paper. We learn about the zygote fungus that forces the amputation of his leg; the tracheal tubes, blood bags and catheters that give him air and nutrients and drain his fluids; the razor with which his father gently shaves him as he lies in a hospital bed; and, later, the artificial legs on which he topples over and which cause his stumps to bleed: “I always damaged you and you despised me as you prodded the gunky scab and the blood that had soaked the sock again. But I was too addictive, we went quicker and farther and you kept coming back for more. You walked across a room and you realised you no longer had to think about each action.” Eventually Barnes becomes proficient enough to drive and shop for himself and even jog in the park.
KINGSMITH.