Dodge Bomb: Outside the Wire in the Second Iraq War. Darin Pepple. 2021.

About halfway through Darin Pepple’s Dodgebomb, a fictional account of a junior officer in Iraq, I found myself losing interest and struggling to continue. The humorous opening grabbed me, as it pokes fun at the rookie’s arrival in Iraq during the height of the 2007-2008 surge, but after a few chapters the plot and characters slowed down and did not seem to be going anywhere. Pepple’s outside-the-wire narrative began to feel like an endless string of random events and vignettes. Wrestling with this, I realized that this is why the book succeeds as an Iraq deployment story—it accurately reflects the long, monotonous grind of a deployment, where there is not necessarily a plot change or character development.

Dodge Bomb follows the fictional Lieutenant Eddie Fitzgerald and his cavalry squadron in Iraq during the 2007-2008 surge. Fresh from West Point and his initial officer training, Pepple chronicles Eddie’s arrival in Iraq, his challenges in establishing himself as a leader in combat, a string of vignettes, a moment of loss, redeployment, and his reflection on the deployment. The book succeeds—for both the veteran and the person with no military experience—as a relatable narrative of a year in Iraq. The characters, frustrations, and emotions are vivid and all too realistic.

Dodgebomb fills a niche in the war stories of Iraq, relating the personal experience of a junior officer during the surge and providing a broad picture of the experience that was the bulk of the Iraq War. Pepple is a former Army officer who served in Iraq during the time the story is set and in the same type of unit; Dodgebomb comes from a place of deep personal experience. Heavy Metal provides a similar experience of a junior officer’s experience in Iraq, but during the intense and comparatively brief invasion.[1] Black Hearts explores the post-invasion period at the small unit level, but focuses on weighty moral and legal issues, not the day-to-day narrative of a year in combat.[2] Like Heavy Metal, Dodgebomb provides a few examples of intense combat, and like Black Hearts, it touches on moral issues, but neither of those are the focus of the story. Instead, it tells the overall experience through Eddie’s eyes, conveying the highs, lows, and boredom of a year away from home.

Although written as a novel, Dodgebomb is a thinly veiled treatment of an actual unit’s experience. Cursory research shows that Route Bug, PB Murray, COP Dolby, the mu zayn house and others were real places and events in Iraq at the height of the surge.[3] While that generally adds to the realism and effective story-telling, it leaves me wondering if there’s more to the character treatments.

The characters are all too realistic. There is the the aptly named Operations Officer, Major Causrahavek: good intentions, but “due to the war, one major usually proved incompetent and the other had to cover down for him.”[4] Or the Personnel Officer, Lieutenant Spinner: sometimes literally spinning in his chair, but always searching unsuccessfully for the information needed. First Sergeant Tapwell is the stereotypical senior NCO in culture: tough, grumpy, sarcastic, but ready with quiet words of wisdom and always thinking about the well-being of his men. Eddie’s platoon is filled with all the stereotypes: the conspiracy theorist, the guy who can’t stop talking about his girl back home, and the antagonizer just looking to get a reaction out of someone.

Beyond the characters, the routine encounters are equally realistic and reinforce Pepple’s efforts to share a deployment experience.

The Troop Commander, Captain Holt, is painted almost heroically and in stark contrast to the squadron commander. Where Holt is calm, common-sense, and genuinely concerned about his Troopers, the Squadron Commander, Lieutenant Colonel “Gute” Gutierrez, is portrayed as unpredictable, petty, self-serving, and vindictive. Gute’s diatribe on leader certification, the Top 15 Priorities, how he’s fully nested with Division Commander’s Intent, and his sudden temper tantrums are eminently relatable to anyone who’s worked in a bureaucracy.

Beyond the characters, the routine encounters are equally realistic and reinforce Pepple’s efforts to share a deployment experience. There is the Commander’s Update Brief gone awry with the Squadron Commander’s temper tantrum and redone in person the next night. Eddie draws the short straw to accompany his commander for some leader development. Sitting in the back row, he zones out only to be jolted back to reality as he realizes Major Causrahavek has just called his name. There are Key Leader Engagements with local sheiks, Iraqi Army partners, and others that highlight the differences of Arabic culture and the American teasing that goes with man-dresses and holding hands. Those scenarios relate moments of humanity that feed Eddie’s tensions later. The hurry up and wait of the redeployment process was entirely too accurate; if anything, the customs ritual at the departure terminal was underplayed.

The story doesn’t spend a lot of time on what I expected the title to be about: convoys and dodging the bombs of the war’s signature weapon, the Improvised Explosive Device (IED). There are a few anecdotes, like Eddie’s initial movement to his unit and references to other platoons’ contact with IEDs, but with the title Dodgebomb I expected more tension and anxiety being on the road in constant danger of being blown up, perhaps as conveyed in The Hurt Locker. The source of the title remains somewhat vague. The platoon has a tension breaking pre-patrol ritual of movie quotes that include Dodgeball, but there are more jokes from Talladega Nights, again leaving me uncertain about the meaning behind the title.

As the book passes the midpoint, Pepple begins to relate some of the dilemmas faced in combat. Shortly after Eddie has dinner at the home of several Iraqi partners, one of them is killed in a case of tribal revenge. Eddie ponders how he should feel about the loss of an Iraqi that he worked and fought with regularly. Should he care about that death? Was he really a friend? Before Eddie can really develop this line of thought, the troop suffers its own loss of a well-liked, respected character. Pepple’s description of Eddie’s dawning realization of what happened, stifling the grief, and having to tell his platoon about it are crushingly accurate. The memorial service was haunting, with the pain of the roll call and the third, full, and final calling of the fallen soldier’s name.

Eddie and his platoon’s struggle to deal with the loss reminded me of the lieutenant’s death in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Everyone continues to act like he’s still there, but just out of sight and about to come back at any minute. For the platoon sergeant to say “the Lieutenant wouldn’t like that” was the harshest criticism, bringing everyone into line and cutting to the heart.[5]

Eddie faces an ethical dilemma when the platoon has to go back on patrol after the memorial service. He realizes that their grief and numbness are making them careless and putting them at risk, so he calls a temporary halt. Should they continue the mission? Return to base early? Or provide false reports to look like they are completing the mission? “‘What are we going to do then?’ SSG Corefelt said. He knew, but he wanted the LT to say it.”[6] Pepple sets up the conflict nicely—you can understand Eddie’s thought process, the risks and the wrongness of the options. Eddie’s solution grates on me and leaves me wondering if I would do any better.

As the unit moves on and prepares to return home, Eddie wrestles with his year in Iraq. Was it all worth it? Did it make a difference? Should he stay in and try to make a difference, to have meaning in the military? Or give up on it and the self-serving leaders and find meaning elsewhere? The timing is appropriate as the U.S. has ended its combat mission in Afghanistan and many—veterans and civilians—are struggling through those same questions and trying to make sense of all the hardship, suffering, and sacrifice. Eddie finds his answer talking to First Sergeant Tapwell during the trip home, but I’m left unsatisfied, wondering if anyone would make their decision that quickly, and what Eddie’s next few months and years would look like as he lives out that decision.

Dodgebomb works as a story of an Iraq deployment. For those who have deployed, the stories and characters ring true. For someone with no military experience, the stories are relatable, funny, heart-wrenching, and effectively convey that experience. Pepple’s treatment of the hard decisions leaders face in combat is equally effective, leaving the reader understanding them, but not always liking them. Pepple’s presentation of Eddie trying to make sense of his deployment is a little short and seems resolved too easily. Especially as I watch the end of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, it leaves me wondering how things really worked out for Eddie Fitzgerald in the months and years after his deployment.

Jon Farr is a cavalryman with experience at multiple command levels, including 3 deployments to the Middle East. This review reflects his own views and not necessarily those of the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

Thank you for being a part of the The Strategy Bridge community. Together, we can #BuildTheBridge.

Header Image: A convoy of U.S. Army soldiers approaches an Iraqi checkpoint outside Samarra, Iraq, Feb. 27, 2007. (DoD Photo)

Notes:

[1] Jason Conroy, Heavy Metal: A Tank Company’s Battle to Baghdad, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

[2] Jim Frederick, Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, New York, Harmony, 2011.

[3] Dale Andrade, Surging South of Baghdad: The 3d Infantry Division and Task Force Marne in Iraq, 2007-2008, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010.

[4] Darin Pepple, Dodge Bomb: Outside the Wire in the Second Iraq War, Middletown, Delaware, Darin Pepple, 2021, 23.

[5] Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959, 143-145.

[6] Darin Pepple, Dodge Bomb: Outside the Wire in the Second Iraq War, Middletown, Delaware, Darin Pepple, 2021, 194.