Back from Iraq — Hanna A. Saadah

Back From Iraq is the story of a soldier, Scott Thornton, who after spending two years in war-torn Baghdad, returns to Oklahoma City a shaken man, only to learn that he has to go back to Iraq again. Changed by his traumatic experiences, he becomes repulsive even to his own family. “What have they done to my son?” says his father, Howard. “Scott never came back from Iraq. He never came back,” says Nancy, his wife. The entire novel, which transpires over a period of four months in 2006, reaches into the deep, dark past of the 20th Century when Baghdad was a beautiful city, and then it races across the war-torn Iraq to the present day. The church and the cemetery frame the novel while Baghdad, Al-Qaeda, the US Armed Forces, the Oklahoma City Police Department, and the Department of Human Services are interlaced into a web of love, intrigue, terrorism, despair, and fear. Transference -- the mighty albatross of the unconscious mind -- spreads its wings, soars high in the mental sky, and then alights upon the characters' minds with mystifying consequences. A kidnapped, five-year-old girl is the linchpin that holds the plot together and the axis around which a heroic father, a libertine mother, a military mentor, and a green-eyed, sainted maiden, revolve. The bloody threads of Al-Qaeda are woven into the novel's tapestry on fear's foreboding loom creating a memorable quilt bursting with forbidden pulses. “Once fear conquers your heart, the only means to overthrow it is to hurl yourself back into it, over and over, until it runs away from you instead of you from it. Waste no time reasoning with fear, Scotty; its only antidotes are reckless courage and blind faith.” These proverbial words of Peckford, Scott's military mentor, provide the ideological scaffold from which the novel hangs as a tour de force of fear-and-peace instead of war-and-peace.