When I was asked to read and review Kevin Maurer’s new novel, I agreed with much enthusiasm. Maurer can easily be described as a subject-matter expert on the U.S. military’s Special Forces community and the war in Afghanistan, and he has authored or co-authored a long list of titles on both subjects, including the New York Times bestselling No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, which he co-authored with Navy SEAL Mark Owen. I’ve also seen several photographs where Mr. Maurer is sporting a first-class “Special Forces Beard,” which I’m automatically jealous of and gives him a fair amount of “street cred” in my book.
Maurer’s latest, The Good Afghan (Permuted Press, 2022), takes place circa 2010 in Afghanistan. The action is set in and around Kandahar Airfield, and follows the intertwining stories of an aging Taliban Commander, a career Special Forces soldier, a local interpreter-turned-contractor, and an overzealous U.S. Air Force Special Investigator. Each character brings to the page a unique view on the war as they seek to fulfill their own agendas, while simultaneously keeping a recently discovered Russian “suitcase nuke” out of the hands of Taliban forces and, ultimately, Al-Qaeda.
On a macro level, Maurer does an excellent job weaving together his various storylines and giving the reader a strong sense of who his characters are and what they represent early in the narrative. Maurer’s descriptions of people and places in Afghanistan lend the novel authenticity, one clue to the author’s own extensive experience. He paints a vivid picture of what it was like to deploy and serve in Afghanistan in those middle years of America’s “Forever War.” As a former Captain in the U.S. Army, I served in the Logar Province of Afghanistan in 2009 and though I was no Special Forces guy, I felt a striking familiarity with many of Maurer’s descriptions, especially the way he wrote about Kandahar Airfield. I spent the better part of a month living on Bagram Airfield during my deployment and couldn’t help but feel the similarities with its corporate chain restaurants, snarky civilian contractors, and legions of lax personnel who lived a life of relative comfort while the war simmered and popped just miles outside their fences.
Expanding on this, Maurer gives the reader a broader sense of how fat and stagnant the war had become by that point in time. This point of view was especially poignant from the eyes of Charlie, the Special Forces Warrant Officer who serves as one of the primary protagonists in The Good Afghan. Charlie is in the latter stages of his career but was present in the beginning when the first Special Forces teams deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11. He remembers when operations were conducted with extreme efficiency and limited oversight—and usually a much higher success rate. Flash forward nine years and the war has been hamstrung for too long, taking a backseat to the priority of the Iraq War and losing almost all momentum. Charlie feels this stagnation as soon as his boots hit the ground and the sentiment is reiterated by his direct supervisor, stressing to him “we need a win” in their area of operation. In fact, all of the characters in the novel share this feeling, including the enemy. After decades of war, Razaq, the aging Taliban Commander, has grown tired of violence and is terrified by the prospect of “death by drones.” He’s ready to be done with it all. And so, when an old Russian nuke is found, Razaq sees it as an opportunity to get out. He recruits his America-loving, contractor nephew, Wali, to help him strike a deal with the Americans.
Maurer does an excellent job capturing how the military, bloated and cumbersome from years of sustainment operations, often stumbled over itself due to so many moving pieces working contrary to one another. This is highlighted in the storyline of Air Force Tech Sgt. Canterbury. Like Charlie, Canterbury has recently arrived in the country, and he’s quickly duped by a crooked Afghan Army General trying to grease his own wheels through lucrative logistics and security contracts. The General tricks the green Special Agent Canterbury into launching an investigation on Wali, who is his main competitor in business. As the stakes rise throughout the book, Canterbury’s relentless investigation serves on numerous occasions as a stumbling block for Charlie and his CIA counterpart, Felix, as they make their quest to recover the Russian suitcase nuke.
On a micro level, Maurer inserts many small details that might slip past someone who never deployed but is likely to delight those who have. One such detail happens when the main character arrives in country and goes to his B-hut to get some sleep. B-huts were wooden buildings that often contained rows of bunks serving as barracks or temporary holding sites for transient soldiers. Whatever the case, it wasn’t unusual for there to be soldiers sleeping in these buildings at all hours of the day due to varying work schedules. As Charlie leaves the hut for the first time, he instinctively reaches behind him and catches the swinging door so as to shut it gently and prevent the door from slamming and waking any sleeping soldiers. This may not seem significant to most, but I immediately flashed back to a similar holdover hut in Kuwait on my way back from leave where several sleepy sergeants would rain holy terror on any soldier inconsiderate enough to let the hut door slam when they came or left. There were several other instances in The Good Afghan that brought similar memories snapping back into place, which speaks volumes about Mr. Maurer’s ability to paint a vivid picture in his scenes.
The pages of The Good Afghan are a testament to Maurer’s intimate knowledge of the military’s Special Operations community, too, its cross-branch dynamics and the intricate ways in which the military fumbles over itself in a never-ending quest to create efficiencies by making things more complicated. Throughout the book, Maurer makes many astute observations regarding the motivations of not only friendly forces but enemy forces and those who live perpetually in the gray areas. Like the war itself, not all characters in the book are quickly recognized as friend or foe, leaving the reader with a satisfying, tension-building sense of foreboding that at any moment one of them might prove to be someone they’re not.
The Good Afghan was a great read and will be enjoyed by both those who served and those who didn’t. The narrative is clean and quick, without an overload of military jargon or an alphabet soup of acronyms, which can often be a hindrance in many military works. Where jargon and acronyms are used, Maurer is quick to clarify their meaning and does so in an organic way so as not to pull the reader from the story. Scene transitions and point-of-view transitions flow smoothly into one another, creating a fast-paced, enthralling story that will keep any reader captivated from start to finish. Go out and get a copy as soon as it hits the shelves!
Brett Allen is a humor writer and author of the Afghanistan war novel, Kilroy Was Here. He is also a contributing writer for Task and Purpose as a member of their Gear Review team. Follow him on Twitter at @hogwashwriting.
