The Valley: A Novel - Hardcover

Renehan, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525954864 ISBN 13: 9780525954866

Verlag: DUTTON BOOKS, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

*Named one of Wall Street Journal's Best Books of 2015
*Selected as a Military Times's Best Book of the Year


 “You’re going up the Valley.”

Black didn’t know its name, but he knew it lay deeper and higher than any other place Americans had ventured. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth. Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst.
 
When Black, a deskbound admin officer, is sent up the Valley to investigate a warning shot fired by a near-forgotten platoon, he can only see it as the final bureaucratic insult in a short and unhappy Army career. What he doesn’t know is that his investigation puts at risk the centuries-old arrangements that keep this violent land in fragile balance, and will launch a shattering personal odyssey of obsession and discovery as Black reckons with the platoon’s dark secrets, accumulated over endless hours fighting and dying in defense of an indefensible piece of land.
 
The Valley is a riveting tour de force that changes our understanding of the men who fight our wars and announces John Renehan as one of the great American storytellers of our time.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

John Renehan served in the Army’s Third Infantry Division as a field artillery officer in Iraq. He previously worked as an attorney in New York City. He lives with his family in Virginia. This is his first novel.

John Renehan served in the Army’s Third Infantry Division as a field artillery officer in Iraq. He previously worked as an attorney in New York City. He lives with his family in Virginia. This is his first novel.

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Chapter 1

"Dude, don't do it."

Black startled and turned in his chair to see one of his least favorite people in the Army.

Bradley Derr, twenty-four going on college freshman, slouched behind him with his hands in his uniform pockets, lip fat with dip, peering over Black's shoulder at the memo sitting out in the open on his desk. Black hadn't heard him approach. Hadn't even noticed as Derr placed the plastic soda bottle he used for his dip spit on the desk right next to Black's arm.

He considered the bottle now as its two inches of dark brown fluid content came to rest. He turned slowly back to Derr and regarded him with a look that he thought was full of significance. It bounced right off Derr's sunburned forehead.

"Damn, Black, you lost in space or something?"

He had been. Before Derr appeared he'd been staring for a long time at the same piece of paper that Derr now gestured to with a flip of his chin.

"Dude, I'm telling you. Don't do it."

Derr was a lieutenant. A junior officer like Black. Unlike Black, he did not work behind a desk in the battalion's paperwork office. Derr spent most of his time outside the dreary midsize base where Black spent all of his time, stomping through the Afghan backhills with his platoon and shooting at people. It was precisely what Derr had imagined he would be doing when he set out to become an Army officer, and the universe had graciously given him no reason to question his assumptions.

Once every couple of weeks he would come back to the base with his guys and spend a day or so crunching around gravel pathways in his sunglasses and eating at the chow hall. When he had paper- type business he needed help with, he made his way back to Black, to be found reliably behind his desk doing precisely the opposite of what he had imagined when he became an Army officer.

Which was where Derr stood now, sunglasses inverted on the back of his head, looking down at Black with mild pity from beneath blond gel spikes.

"What do you need, Derr?"

"I need a hard copy of my pay stub so I can show the bitchwife I ain't holding out on her."

Derr considered himself a laugh riot, in addition to handsome and suave. Apparently some misguided young lady somewhere back in the United States thought so too. Derr was, inexplicably, married.

"Bitchwife" was only one of the fond names by which Black had come to know Derr's beloved. She was also, depending on the day, "fuckslut," "my opinion," or "the 'ho,' " along with other names Black cared to forget. It occurred to him that he did not actually know the unfortunate girl's name.

"Such deep respect," he said blandly as he turned to his computer.

Derr snorted.

"Pfft! You should hear what she makes me call her in bed."

He laughed and sent a fresh muddy slug into his dip bottle. He was proud of his ability to spit shining wads of tobacco phlegm cleanly through a two-centimeter Coke bottle opening, straight to the tidy puddle at the bottom, without leaving the brown residue often seen trickling down the insides of such receptacles. Derr considered this, alone among all aspects of the Army's second-favorite pastime after smoking, to be unsightly.

"You know," he said, "that's funny, Black, because 'Deep Respect' is actually our name for one of our things she makes me do."

He adopted an athletic stance and prepared an expressive tableau.

"I sort of get her by the legs right here, and-"

"Why don't I print your thing."

Derr shrugged.

"Suit yourself, bud. Deep Respect's good stuff, though. Works every time."

Black did not ask and tried not to wonder what "works" meant. He called up Derr's records and printed off his most recent Leave and Earnings Statement. He observed that, as fellow first lieutenants, he and Derr made precisely the same amount of money. Who shoul

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DUTTON BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0525954864
• ISBN 13: 9780525954866
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; Deutschland