Wynne's War (Eamon Dolan)
In Iraq, the unhappy, loveless Corporal Elijah Russell runs into cross fire to save a beautiful Arabian horse. Miraculously, even though he’s wounded, he succeeds. The episode winds up on YouTube and comes to the attention of an obsessive commander in Afghanistan, Captain Carson Wynne. Wynne commandeers Russell for a secret mission where Russell’s job is to train horses and train Green Berets to ride them. He’s skilled at this, and Gwyn’s horse scenes are exquisite, in the bargain giving us some agreeable insight into Russell’s Oklahoma upbringing. Also, Gwyn’s combat scenes are realistic, meticulous, and passionate. But while the secret mission begins like a journey into the heart of darkness, Captain Wynne never becomes Kurtz; he’s just a smart, tough captain. The captain’s ordinariness, in tandem with Russell’s woeful-but-predictable love affair, causes the novel to veer from the high literary into a genre effort that’s long on action and short on character development. Nothing wrong with that, but the reader is left feeling that Gwyn wants to write for the movies. Wynne’s War, in fact, would make a fine movie. --John Mort