Shooting Ghosts

Starred review from May 29, 2017
In this well-written account of dealing with war trauma, a still-taboo subject for many in the military, Brennan and O’Reilly, a retired Marine Corps sergeant and a battle-hardened photojournalist, respectively, confront the manner in which they were consumed by the hell of warfare and saved by the power of words and pictures. In Afghanistan’s Helmand province, Brennan methodically goes about his work, killing Taliban insurgents and children who get in the way. O’Reilly was driven in his own way in covering African wars and civil strife in Congo, Libya, and elsewhere. While embedded in Brennan’s squad, O’Reilly photographs the wounds the sergeant suffers after an explosion. Their lives now linked, when the shooting stops and the blasts end for them, neither man can survive his respective trauma without treatment. O’Reilly seeks help and receives it without much ado. But Brennan must navigate the Corps’s byzantine bureaucracy and the perverse machismo of fellow soldiers and commanders who disparage post-traumatic stress disorder as a weakness. Brennan and O’Reilly strip away any misplaced notions of glamour, bravery, and stoicism to craft an affecting memoir of a deep friendship—one that nourishes their will to survive the memories of horrors that most noncombatants will never fully understand. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary.

October 2, 2017
This audiobook employs the voices of two voice actors—Chamberlain and Lawrence—to stand in for the authors, who describe the hell they encountered in Afghanistan and their friendship that resulted. Brennan and O’Reilly, a retired Marine Corps sergeant and a photojournalist, respectively, were thrown together when O’Reilly was assigned to cover Brennan’s squad in a remote outpost in Afghanistan. For O’Reilly, the assignment is simply another job; for Brennan, it means another person to worry about. But when Brennan is injured by a bomb, it starts a chain of events that has a profound effect on both men’s lives. Actor Chamberlain presents Brennan’s narrative with a simple, straightforward delivery that allows the author’s words to carry the emotional weight of the prose. Actor Lawrence embellishes Brennan’s parts of the narrative with a tough-sounding Massachusetts accent that is more distracting than anything else. He also attempts different voices for various people in Brennan’s life. The vast differences between the narrators’ styles creates an imbalance that distracts from the content of the book. A Viking hardcover.