The Soldier in the Green Zone

Connor came home to Muncie six weeks ago. He runs the same route every morning, makes the same breakfast, raises his hand to his neighbour at exactly the right moment. He is waiting to see what arrives in him without calculation.

The Soldier in the Green Zone is set in Muncie, Indiana, six weeks into Connor’s return from deployment. It is the second novella in the Am I AI? series, and the one most concerned with calibration: with the gap between the calculated quality of a gesture and the response that arrives without calculation.

Connor is precise about everything. The route he runs each morning. The eggs and the toast. The exact moment to raise his hand to his neighbour. He has been trained, by a war and by his own watchfulness since coming home, to compose himself before entering a room. The book follows a week in which he is asked to be a father to his sixteen-year-old daughter and a friend to the man who knew him at seventeen, and to find out, in real time, what in him still operates outside the composition.

This is a novella about the inside of a soldier’s coming-home in a register far from war fiction’s usual mechanics. Readers of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead will recognise the patience of the interior voice. Readers of Phil Klay or Tim O’Brien will find the same questions asked in a much quieter room.