Book Report: Bring Out the Dog

23. Will Mackin, Bring Out the Dog (2022) (10/18/22)

I'm not sure where I heard about this book, but it may have been a mention by George Saunders somewhere, in a podcast perhaps. Saunders was Mackin's teacher. Saunders wrote an enthusiastic blurb for this book, calling it a "near-miraculous, brilliant debut." I'm not crazy about hyperbole, and I would not echo Saunders here—but I would say, this is a darn good book.

I do, for some reason I can't pin down, like war fiction. Movies, novels. It's maybe easier for me to identify with WWII fiction than any other kind, but I appreciate Vietnam, I appreciate Afghanistan. In extremis. There's a state I'll never experience—and never would want to experience—except through fiction. Maybe I think it's important to glimpse it.

Bring Out the Dog comprises eleven stories, mostly set in Afghanistan around 2008, 2009. The stories are all told by a basically nameless narrator (he's identified by his radio call sign as Yankee Two late on), a JTAC (joint terminal attack controller) attached to a Navy SEAL team. The stories don't describe a traditional "arc," with instigating event, development, denouement, and resolution. More often than not, the final paragraphs just leave you thinking about "it all." The stories describe a time and place, and people in it, and lived circumstance. From a unique point of view.

I flagged four bits of text, though I could have flagged so many more. Here's one of them, which takes place at the memorial service for a Belgian malanois named Mir, killed accidentally by one of the troop:

Chuck wandered in and sat next to me.
     Chuck was a civilian contractor in his sixties. His last war had been Vietnam, where he'd done PSYOP, which, as far as I could gather from the stories he told, had entailed walking through villages naked and unarmed in broad daylight and spray-painting oxen gold. Afterward he'd gone off to a ranch in Texas, where he'd cleared brush, watered cattle, and driven the plow. Now he was our camp commandant, responsible for the day-to-day upkeep of our tiny compound within the larger FOB, and arguably the best one we'd ever had. Because Chuck knew the difference between those things we needed (hot water, clean shitters, 120 VAC) and those things we wanted (NFL cheerleaders, broadband, tins of bear meat) and those things we didn't even know we wanted.
     Chuck leaned over. "Who wants an orange whip?" he whispered.
     "Me," I said.
     "We'll go right after this."

Orange whip, it turns out, is a drug obtained from the local vet. Mir probably would have approved.

War is senseless, inconceivable, bizarre. And yet it's happening right now. I am fascinated by the efforts, by people who have experienced the chaos, to explain to the rest of us what it means.