In 2005, Lt. Colonel Bill Russell Edmonds spent a year embedded with an Iraqi army unit in the city of Mosul. As an American Special Forces adviser, he oversaw interrogations of newly captured suspected insurgents. Initially, Edmonds could neither speak Arabic nor directly command his Iraqi counterparts, forcing him to rely on translators and the patient guidance of an Iraqi intelligence officer to carry out his mission. That mission became a frustrating moral test as Edmonds was frequently required to prevent the Iraqis from treating their prisoners too harshly, which sometimes allowed murderers and rapists back on the street thanks to a lack of confessions. A mix of monotony, malaise, muddied morals and a disintegrating long-distance relationship festered into a silent, psychic wound.
In 2011, while living with his wife and daughters in Germany, Edmonds's latent PTSD became a full-blown psychiatric crisis. Over the course of 30 days, he developed manic symptoms, delusional thoughts and insomnia, which finally drove him to seek help from the army's mental health services. He was turned away for not meeting the treatment threshold. Luckily, Edmonds found a therapeutic outlet by writing about his wartime experiences.
God Is Not Here: A Soldier's Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War alternates between eloquently introspective, journal-like accounts of Edmonds's time in Iraq and disturbing snapshots of his 2011 breakdown. The result is a haunting and beautifully written plunge through the moral morass of the American occupation of Iraq and its grave toll on veterans. God Is Not Here is a military memoir not to be missed. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer