May 1, 2003

A Tale of Two Brothers: One in War, One Insane

or the second time Andrew Huebner has written a spare, forceful novel that has military history and his own family's history intertwined. In "American by Blood" he invoked the great-great-grandfather Huebner who served at the time of Custer's Last Stand. Now in "We Pierce," a book made eerily timely by its accounts of war in Iraq, a soldier named Huebner again looms large in his imagination.

The author's own experience is in "We Pierce," too, but it is in the second part of this story. Of two Huebner brothers from Athens, Ga., Smith goes to war while Sam goes haywire. "Smith stayed at home in Athens, fell in love and joined the Army. Sam moved into a house full of anarchists, punks and hard-cores. They were his friends, but he wasn't one of them." When Sam moves to New York City, fueled by literary aspirations, and starts drifting toward a downtown druggy milieu, much of Sam's sense of authenticity still comes from having read punk rock magazines at the 7-Eleven back home.

As the book begins in August 1990, the looming war has taken more than just the Huebners by surprise. "Most Americans had to watch Special Reports on the news that interrupted their soap operas, ball games or the new fake real shows like `Current Affair' and `Cops' to learn exactly where Kuwait was." Neither brother is sure what he thinks about world affairs, but both respect a long family tradition of military service:

"His uncle Pete had survived Vietnam, but was never the same. Something in Smith was scared the same would happen to him. Something else wanted to prove that it wouldn't."

So Smith enlists, bidding goodbye to his pregnant wife, and to Senator Jesse Helms, a friend of her family. "He really is a nice man," she says. "I've known him since I was a child." Smith replies: "Tell that to the help."

He becomes a tank commander, moving from Saudi Arabia into Iraq. And half of "We Pierce" is about crystallizing the importance of what he sees there. By grim coincidence some of what the author winds up describing has been captured with great immediacy by recent news reporting.

"Never knew scary could be so pretty," one officer tells his crew in the midst of battle as green and blue tracers fly through the air. The author undoubtedly draws upon his real brother's gulf war experience in describing sheer horror, too. During one sandstorm, suddenly "the world cracked open and all was clear," he writes. "There was the Iraqi commander, his thighs, his waist, shoulders, helmeted head sticking out of the T-72's turret. This was the image that would stick in his head when he dreamed about the war for the rest of his life."

"We Pierce" pivots between these events and Sam's slow decline in New York, certain that the brothers' fates are intertwined. "He knew that there was a connection between his brother going to war and his own losing his way," the book says of Sam. The link is made explicit by Sam's participation in antiwar protests and how it jibes with Smith's sense of military honor.

"Sam, I'm the soldier, not the war," Smith says in the occasional moment when the author spells things out too bluntly. "I believe that it's the Army's job to protect freedom. I know it sounds hokey. I also believe in a country that lets me fight a war while you protest it."

Since Mr. Huebner's writing is almost as formidable as his appearance (he can be seen glowering on the book jacket's rear flap), much of his book is tough enough to override the ordinary. Besides, he makes deliberate use of the mundane quality of some of this story.

"He knew he was naïve and kind of a cliché," he writes of Sam, who has deliberately attended college for the same length of time that Bob Dylan did. Sam wanders around Greenwich Village looking for streets mentioned in songs. Eventually he meets a law enforcement officer who tells him to read Dostoevski if he wants to learn about life's lower depths.

Sam is "just another kid from somewhere else who wanted to be someone else." But "We Pierce" is wise and unabashed in describing his attempts to figure himself out. Sam writes a terrible sounding novel called "Barefoot in Hell" and submits it to an editor, who tells him, "Honestly, I'm working on a book, too," adding: "We're all working on books, man. In my opinion, it's a lot easier to get a drug habit than a publishing deal."

Sam does get the drug habit and loses touch with reality, even as his brother's battlefield experiences become increasingly surreal in their own way. There is a moment after battle when "the soldiers stood and stared as pilgrims at a forethought of apocalypse flashing before their eyes. They stood and listened to the stories from the blackened lips of the burned corpses in the cars."

Mr. Huebner clearly risks sounding specious in linking such searing imagery to the New York literary-narcotic demimonde. And he hardly treads new ground in giving the brothers a sad set of parents to explain their sense of being adrift. But he is often capable of a terse, angry eloquence that unifies the book's divergent threads. "My beautiful young wife, I hit her," their hard-drinking father confesses to Sam, whose mother disappeared from his life so early that her children never knew her first name. "Everything is not contained in one moment, son. But sometimes you have to pay for it like it is."