Young Guns

According to Statistics Canada, 17 percent of those serving in the military are between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. Half are thirty-four or under. This reality about the army — that it is a young person’s game — underlies Juiceboxers, the debut novel from the poet and veteran Benjamin Hertwig. Writing about the war in Afghanistan, he produces a commentary on the jarring consequences for children who come of age while chasing false dreams in combat.

The protagonist is Plinko, an Edmontonian who signs up at the age of sixteen and receives his nickname shortly after arriving for basic training (we learn his real name, Robert, only near the end). From the start, he searches for meaningful companionship, and he finds a version of it in a dysfunctional group of fellow recruits: Abdi, the son of Somali immigrants; Abdi’s best friend, a lanky kid named Walsh; and Krug, a brash and insecure loudmouth.

As Hertwig follows the foursome, he never loses sight of their youthfulness. When Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings movie comes out, all of them — even Krug — go to see it in theatres in full costume. On another night, after a training session, they go to dinner at Abdi’s house, where they act like awkward teenagers working hard to behave in front of their elders. Later, Plinko asks his warrant officer, “Do you know what it’s like to shave over pimples?” In Afghanistan, the perspicacity of Plinko’s insights matches his limited life experiences. Driving through Kandahar City, he watches bakers kneading dough in clay pots. “Being a baker in the middle of a war zone,” he thinks. “Wow.”

The novel’s narrative propulsion comes from anticipating the clash of this childish innocence with the reality of active military life. Each of the characters enlists before 9/11. War is an entirely abstract notion to them, little more than a game of dress‑up; it looms “like a magical mountain, the peak shrouded in clouds of private mystery.” It’s 2007 by the time they leave Canada, and Plinko considers himself an adult by then: “He could eat fast food whenever he wanted.” With time, each of the four friends is traumatized in his own way.

Throughout his deployment, Plinko holds on to his fantasy of finding lifelong camaraderie. He believes he has developed lasting relationships, particularly with Abdi and Walsh. But once they are abroad, it becomes evident to the reader that he never truly sees his friends. He is oblivious to Abdi’s painful experience of being ostracized as a Muslim in their platoon and doesn’t realize that Walsh is trying to hide something from his fellow soldiers. Plinko’s immaturity insulates him from the growing hatred, anger, and violence that surround him. No matter how close they come to him, he never acknowledges anything that he doesn’t wish to.

Last November, Hertwig published an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail about the disconnect between Remembrance Day — the stories told at ceremonies, the poems read — and the disturbing reality of what he experienced while fighting. He described the way military uniforms transformed from “a source of comfort” as a child to “an extension of [his] own anger at the banal futility of the War on Terror.” In Juiceboxers, he vividly portrays this senselessness. Plinko and his fellow soldiers accomplish very little while in Afghanistan. Their fantasies of hard-fought battles are quickly replaced by repeated convoys into Kandahar City, where they hope to avoid a suicide bombing or ambush.

The idea of a hero’s journey is one of the illusions of war that Hertwig examines and discards. But his main target is the supposedly incomparable bonds that form between those who wear the uniform. In Juiceboxers, there are no bands of brothers. There are just young impressionable men — and it is only men in this case — who are confronted with the emptiness of what the army promises. His characters don’t so much grow up; they just get older, accumulating years and waiting for a sense of purpose that never comes.

Given this tone, it is not much of a spoiler to say that Plinko returns home a broken man. In his despair, he is left lonely and disconnected, without the ties of family, friendship, or the love that he so fervently desires. “The stories were bullshit,” Plinko realizes. “Everything was bullshit.” His heartbreaking fate is a direct consequence of conflict, a connection that the author presents in an unvarnished state. In his telling, combat does not bring people together. It picks at their differences and vulnerabilities. It fabricates a false sense of togetherness that is, as Walsh notes in one of the novel’s most quietly devastating lines, “as real as the war.”

If Hertwig hopes to communicate a clear anti-war message with Juiceboxers — and at times, his delivery can be heavy-handed — he also attempts to chart a path to redemption, not necessarily for those who sent troops to Afghanistan but for the veterans who must now find ways to look beyond the pretenses that justify violence and learn to see one another and the world as it really is. Hertwig does not suggest that this is possible for all his characters. But in Plinko — who is thirty-three at the end of the book, older than almost half of Canadians serving in the military — there is a sense of hope that, even if the war took his youth, it may not be too late for him to come of age.