Five and Twenty-Fives (Pitre)

Five and Twenty-Fives 
Michael Pitre, 2014
Bloomsbury USA
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620407547


Summary
It’s the rule—always watch your fives and twenty-fives. When a convoy halts to investigate a possible roadside bomb, stay in the vehicle and scan five meters in every direction.

A bomb inside five meters cuts through the armor, killing everyone in the truck. Once clear, get out and sweep twenty-five meters. A bomb inside twenty-five meters kills the dismounted scouts investigating the road ahead.

Fives and twenty-fives mark the measure of a marine’s life in the road repair platoon. Dispatched to fill potholes on the highways of Iraq, the platoon works to assure safe passage for citizens and military personnel. Their mission lacks the glory of the infantry, but in a war where every pothole contains a hidden bomb, road repair brings its own danger.

Lieutenant Donavan leads the platoon, painfully aware of his shortcomings and isolated by his rank. Doc Pleasant, the medic, joined for opportunity, but finds his pride undone as he watches friends die. And there’s Kateb, known to the Americans as Dodge, an Iraqi interpreter whose love of American culture—from hip-hop to the dog-eared copy of Huck Finn he carries—is matched only by his disdain for what Americans are doing to his country.

Returning home, they exchange one set of decisions and repercussions for another, struggling to find a place in a world that no longer knows them. A debut both transcendent and rooted in the flesh, Fives and Twenty-Fives is a deeply necessary novel. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1978-79
• Where—Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, USA
• Raised—states of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana
• Education—B.A., Louisian State University; M.B.A., Loyola University
• Currently—lives in New Orleans


Michael Pitre is a graduate of Louisiana State University, where he was a double major in history and creative writing. In 2002, he joined the Marines, deploying twice to Iraq and attaining the rank of Captain before leaving the service in 2010 to get his MBA at Loyola. He lives in New Orleans. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Pitre…provides an unblinking, razor-edged portrait of the war through the lives of members of his fictional platoon. Like Phil Klay in his short-story collection Redeployment, he focuses on the war's emotional fallout—not just in real time in Iraq, but afterward, too, as it continues to haunt veterans following their return home…Mr. Pitre makes us care about all these soldiers and their efforts to navigate the war.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times Book Review


Gripping and penetrating.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution


(Starred review.) [u]nflinching portrait of the Iraq war, both through flashbacks to the conflict and stories about its principal characters once they have returned home.... Pitre’s restrained depictions...[are] praiseworthy. But it’s the nuanced take on Dodge’s divided loyalties...that imbues the novel with depth and integrity.
Publishers Weekly


Pitre’s suspenseful debut, influenced by his combat experience in the Iraq War, follows a Marine Corps road crew searching for hidden bombs on the treacherous highways encircling Baghdad.... A thrilling, defining novel of the Iraq War. —Adam Morgan
Booklist


The quiet pathos of war, its aftermath and the individuals affected by it, and the inability of a tone-deaf society to relate to them, is rendered with poignancy and stark honesty in Fives and Twenty-Fives. Readers will be floored by Pitre's spare literary style, the authenticity of each of his characters' three different voices, and those mesmerizing characters themselves...; we are lucky to have such a fine voice as Pitre's....
Shelf Awareness


(Starred review.) The corrosive psychological effects—and the dark humor—of modern conflict are hauntingly captured in Iraq War veteran Pitre's powerfully understated debut.... Though the narrative voices...sometimes blend together, and the scenes on the homefront...are a bit undercooked, those are minor flaws in a book in which everything rings so unshakably true.... [O]ne of the definitive renderings of the Iraq experience.
Kirkus Reviews

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