Dark at the Crossing Nat'l Book Award Nominee - Continuous Conflicts in the Middle East

Elliot Ackerman's "Dark at the Crossing" is nominated for the 2018 Nat'l Book Award for fiction.  The novel is a conflux of confusion covering the civil wars within Iraq and Syria and warfare aimed at removing the Assad regime in Syrian and destroying Daesh, a.k.a. ISIS fighters.   Haris is an Iraqi/American who served as an interpreter for the US Army in Iraq.  He received his American citizenship for his service.  With the money he earned as an interpreter and his US citizenship, he brings his younger sister back to the states.  Haris left the war torn are but never left the war behind him.  Once he has his sister is settled Haris finds himself untethered.  He leaves the US to enter into Syria through Turkey willing to sacrifice himself for a free Syria, a cause he knew to be right.  But his clarity for returning to fight becomes muddled, partly from quilt fighting alongside the American in a cause he felt was wrong.  While detained in Turkey and planning to enter Syria as a soldier against Assad, Haris questions if he believed in war not as a cause but as a purpose or even as an impulse "the way a painter paints, or a musician plays, a necessary impulse."  Haris was recruited online as a fighter for the Free Army's Revolution.  He was deceived and robbed of his money, passport and possessions while attempting to cross.  He's left stranded in Turkey but is befriended by Amir and his wife Daphne.  The estranged couple escaped from Aleppo but without their beloved daughter.  Daphne believes fervently her daughter has survived and is determined to return and search for her.  Amir agrees to help them in their seemingly futile or suicidal mission.   The curious love triangle only convolutes this already hazy novel.  The young vagrant refugees cast aside and the severely wounded in the ill-equipped hospital paint a clearer picture of the collateral fall-outs of warfare.  The potency of Ackerman's novel is its anti-war messaging.  Amir, the pragmatist contends  "The Free Army's Revolution, Daesh's jihad, their causes had muddled, leading nowhere."  War sparked by idealism, martyrdom or radicalism exacts its toll of never-ending cycles of revenge, destruction and death.  I don't recommend the dismal & perplexing novel "Dark at the Crossing."