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by Michael Pitre
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.
"Starred Review. A war novel with a voice all its own, this will stand as one of the definitive rendering of the Iraq experience." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Pitre's restrained depictions of Doc and Donovan's wartime doings and their labored readjustment to civilian life...is praiseworthy. But it's the nuanced take on Dodge's divided loyalties - to his family, country, and postwar identity as an activist in Tunisia pressing for President Ben Ali's resignation - that imbues the novel with depth and integrity." - Publishers Weekly
"A thrilling, defining novel of the Iraq War." - Booklist
"More than any other novel about our recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Fives and Twenty-Fives demonstrates how hard it is for troops to leave war behind them in a foreign country...Just as these men and women can't shake the war from their souls, readers won't easily forget the Marines of Engineer Support Company." - David Abrams, author of Fobbit
"Fives and Twenty-Fives is one of the great novels of war, the kind of book that comes along only once or twice each generation." - Joseph Boyden, author of Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce
"An authentic and evocative novel about the many battlefields that soldiers face, Fives and Twenty-Fives represents an important new voice in the literature on war." - Dominic Tierney, author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires and the American Way of War
This information about Fives and Twenty-Fives was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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