Sparta: A Novel

When I returned home Vietnam in 1970, authors had begun telling the Vietnam experience. Michael Herr, Larry Heinemann, Neil Sheehan, Bobby Jo Mason, Rick Atkinson, Gloria Emerson, David Halberstam, Ward Just, James Webb, Frances Fitzgerald, Tim O'Brien and many others tried through literature to understand a war that was long, horrific, misunderstood, so wrong and, in 1970, still going on. I was an infantryman and I have always felt that no author re-created the experience of Vietnam for the infantryman as well as Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried.Now we have a new classic. Roxana Robinson in Sparta has accomplished an understanding of PTSD with such intricate complexity that the book amazed me.The author takes us on a journey through the life of the returning soldier, Marine Lieutenant Conrad Farrell, who joined the military after studying classics at Williams College. We are introduced to the history of Sparta, its connection to Farrell's classics studies and the enlistee's unusual decision to serve a higher purpose by joining the Marines. This naïve patriotism/idealism sired by the Greek classics rebounded on him and his family in ways that he never could have understood before his enlistment unless, of course, if he had read the Vietnam classics.Farrell becomes an officer at Quantico where he begins to learn the art of shunning those who do not fit in. The military teaches you to despise before it teaches you to kill. If it does not teach that lesson well, a soldier cannot kill and expect to ever again regain a measure of mental stabily. Robinson describes this in one amazing narration.Conrad's training leads him to Iraq in the years between 2003-2006 where he is subjected to the trauma of war as a victim and an avid participant. He then goes from the war zone in 2006 to civilian life in one plane ride. He arrives home with no understanding of himself, his mission or the country that sent him there. He arrives to a family who no longer have any understanding of him. However, his family has one ingredient that not every returning veteran returns to: a family who deeply wants to understand and help. Farrell's only trust is placed in his former platoon members who are now scattered throughout the country and Afghanistan and to whom he connects by email. Some of them are now facing the same enemy as Farrell. The only Americans he identifies with are those who face American life as landscapers, cab drivers, kitchen workers, maids and others who struggle at the low end of our economic ladder and whom Farrell believes may not even be Americans. He sees the rest of our celebrity culture as anathema to his Marine training. His eyes are drawn to those who look like they might be from Iraq and and Middle Eastern regions. His father and mother are strangers, his sister and brother are strangers, his girlfriend is a stranger, former friends are strangers and the world is a place that must be seen with your back to the wall and your eyes open.This is the finest novel I have ever read on the topic of PTSD. Roxana Robinson captures the world of a mentally stricken veteran who exists before his service and after his service with a stark line down the middle. It is a fascinating portrayal, made more fascinating by the fact that just like the best movie about the Iraq experience won an Academy Award for a woman director, Katherine Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, the best novel about PTSD is also written by a woman, Roxana Robinson. Ms. Robinson should be rewarded as bountifully as Ms. Bigelow was because she has rewarded her readers with a superb novel that is hard to read but impossible to put down.

Roxana Robinson's SPARTA is gut-wrenching, heartbreaking literary fiction that kept me reading late into the night, And as I got closer and closer to the book's end, I began to dread what would come, was actually afraid for this young man, protagonist Conrad Farrell, and what he might do. Because he had become that real to me. Not a fictional character, but a real-life, flesh and blood human being, and one who was in deep trouble, tortured by unbearable "storms of anguish and grief and despair ... of guilt and shame."With Marine Corps LT Conrad Farrell, a returning Iraq War veteran, Roxana Robinson has created a character who, while real enough as an individual - and vividly so - could also be construed as a composite of thousands of veterans irreparably damaged by the war. And so many of them, like Farrell, fail to seek help because they are still governed by the "suck it up" and "be a man" mindset drilled into them by their training.Farrell comes from a comfortably upper-class background in Westchester County, and is a graduate of Williams College, where he studied the classics. His father is a professor, his mother a licensed social worker and therapist. It seems an unlikely background for a Marine officer, in this era of no draft and a professional military which comprises barely one percent of the population. But Conrad was drawn by that age old pull of wanting to test himself, and there was also some idealism, wanting to do something for his country. The Iraq War was not yet a reality when he signed up, but came soon after, and his long nightmare of combat, casualties, and his subsequent return to an uncaring general populace is documented here in a narrative so compelling and real that it will not just draw you in; it will break your heart.It doesn't take Conrad long, upon his return home, to realize that he doesn't fit in, not with his loving family, not with his girl friend. Not anywhere. A veteran of numerous firefights and victim of IEDs, he is plagued by crippling headaches, bloody memories and horrifying flashbacks, and forced to admit, "The stuff in my head is permanent. It can't be erased." And only when thoughts of suicide become more frequent does he seek help, through an overburdened and indifferent VA Hospital system.Robinson compares the rigid warrior codes and training of Sparta, the ancient Greek city-state, to those of the Marine Corps, and tells us -"Sparta failed, in the end, because the energies of the state were directed only toward war ... The costs of war were great, both to the nation and to the soldiers. Sparta made young boys into warriors; it was left to the warriors to restore themselves to men."Conrad Farrell's story is grim proof of the difficulty of effecting such a restoration.Roxana Robinson's previous novel, which I have not read, is called COST. She could have easily used the same title for this book, with its heart wrenching descriptions of the human cost of our current wars. Robinson is a marvelous writer, and SPARTA is a book which cries out to be read. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA