Book Review: Desert Mementos
- Oct 17, 2017
- 3 min read
Desert Mementos: Stories of Iraq and Nevada by Caleb S. Cage, University of Nevada Press, 2017, $22.95 hardcover
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
To grow up in Nevada is to learn a certain scrappiness at a young age, a kind of resilience in the face of a hard landscape. It’s the same quality the characters in Caleb Cage’s new short-story collection, Desert Mementos: Stories of Iraq and Nevada, carry with them into battle.
Cage is a Reno native, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq — both as a platoon leader and administrative captain — and he’s the co-author of The Gods of Diyala: Transfer of Command in Iraq. Desert Mementos contains nine stories, the majority of which are set in Iraq and follow young soldiers on patrol during the U.S.-led war effort. The first and last stories of the collection are set in Nevada. Even the stories set in Iraq interpret Nevada to some degree as soldiers reminisce on their home state; parallels are drawn between the Iraqi desert and the arid country of the Great Basin.
Desert Mementos is gritty. Cage writes in the style of hard-boiled realism. His descriptions and dialogue are terse, yet he draws complex emotions from his characters. He doesn’t moralize or glorify the war. He shows its effects up close and personal. The effects of losing friends. The effects of killing. Or not killing when given the chance. He shows how the human conscience disappears and reappears and swirls like smoke on the battlefield. Or lodges in the mind like a stone. In “Proxy War,” a young sergeant displays a revolting lack of humanity when cleaning up the bodily remains of a suicide bomber. Later outed by an American reporter, he takes his own life, leaving his fellow soldiers bereft, questioning their own allegiances. In “Watching Him Die,” a story loosely tied to the Johnny Cash song about Reno, a platoon leader has the chance to take revenge on a dying insurgent but doesn’t, wondering about his own commitment to pull the trigger. In “Desert Island,” a corporeal learns his comrade slept with his wife back in the states. While scoping a potential combatant in his rifle, he tells his former friend, who’s standing next to him, “We kill much, much better men than you all the time in this country.”
Desert Mementos arrives at a political moment when people are questioning popular conceptions of masculinity. Men themselves are questioning what it means to be a man, a husband, a father, a friend, in the twenty-first century. In Desert Mementos, especially in the stories set in Iraq, we find stoicism, cowardice, aggression, self-destruction. We also find compassion and courage. In the two stories set in Nevada, we find thematic keys with which to unlock the clenched fist of an archaic masculinity. In “Tonopah Low,” a soldier drives through a Nevada snowstorm to meet his estranged sweetheart before deploying. Even in his fear and desolation, a sense of home emerges. The same open desert that kills also nurtures, provides space in which to grow: “All of Nevada looks nice at night, and especially when it is covered in fresh snow. It looks like renewal, even if you know it will be gone in a day or two.” In the collection’s last story, “The Golden Dragon,” a soldier visits his favorite Reno restaurant. Readjusting to life after war, he’s begun noticing things about his hometown, crime and prostitution, as though his combat experience has tinged everything with sin. Eating with him, his pregnant fiancée expresses anxiety about their future. “This is all we have that matters anymore,” he says, holding up a sonogram of their unborn child. He tells her, “everything is going to be just fine.” In this false assurance, in this aspiration to protect his family — a transfer of power, a shift in allegiance — we find an intimation of redemption, as though even in a broken world the soldier could pick up the pieces of his idealism and build something new for those he loves.
