Customer Reviews

Prayer at Rumayla

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I climbed into bed last night and started reading, intending only to read for a few minutes. Several hours later I finished "Prayer at Rumayla." Charles has captured the feel of what we combat vets know to be true. It was all there: Anger, rage, self-loathing, mental anguish. The list goes on. The next time I get asked "how did the war affect you?" I'll simply say: READ THIS BOOK.

I saw so much of myself in Chet's character. Questioning how I could have done the things I did, why I'm doing the things I do now. Searching for answers to questions I can't even formulate. The in-garrison sections were so true, I'd swear he had a hidden camera at my outfit when we got back! The REMFs, the ones who didn't go--they could never understand what the war did to us. They saw it on the television; we saw it on the faces of our buddies and the people we fought. I still see those faces every night when I go to sleep. As for relationships with families, girlfriends, wives? Charles nailed that too. These were the silent casualties of war. Readers will see the effect that war has on those who stayed behind as they try to understand the soldier who left as one person but came back as another.

Gulf War vet? Read this book and see yourself. Know a Gulf War vet? Read this book for insight into why he is the way he is. Want to know what it was like? Read this book and look at the unspoken side of war.

I was a tanker in Desert Storm so I was very anxious to read this book. It is a good book and accurately depicts what life was like for us overthere. It shows Desert Storm was not some slick footage that civilians saw on television every night, but real soldiers doing real killing in face to face combat. My only problem with this book is the character's angst became boring after awhile. He obviously needed some help but everybody who offered a chance for this guy to unburden on, he hurt or turned away in some manner or another. Overall this book is well written and clearly shows the pain soldiers face after surviving battle.

Sheehan-Miles does a great job of showing us what the day to day was like for a tank loader in the Gulf War. The sleep deprived crew is counted on to make the right, split-second decisions in the middle of combat. It was not all ice cream and rounding up prisoners.
He also shows what the struggle was like for a young man returning to the "sanity" of America and trying to work out his feelings about what he had to do to keep himself and his fellow soldiers alive.
Chet Brown has elements of Catcher in the Rye in his back-in-the-states persona. He is complex and does things he does not fully understand because of his inward struggle. It is a brutal portrayal of someone fighting his demons about actions that he truly had no control over.
I agree with an earlier review that called for the copy editor's head for the spelling and sentence problems that were left in the book.
I look forward to reading more from Charles Sheehan-Miles.

I just finished a stunning novel by Charles Sheehan-Miles entitled Prayer at Rumayla. The main character is a tank loader in the Gulf War. The action takes place after the war is over, but there are remembrances of the war throughout the book. Military recruits can read a bit about the horrors of war and how unprepared they will be for the carnage. You get a glimpse into the soul of a damaged warrior. Sheehan-Miles takes you right into the mind of the main character: the good, bad, and the ugly of it.

Those who have not served in combat will hopefully be able to use this book to better appreciate those who had to live through war. We learn that the CNN footage and glowing reports were not the reality of the Gulf War. It is a good clue to how our media sanitizes what we see and hear.

Get the book. Read the book. Learn the truth.

Prayer At Rumayla: A Novel Of The Gulf War is as timely as tomorrow's newspaper headlines. Written by Gulf War veteran and novelist Charles Sheehan-Miles, this is the story of a returning Gulf War veteran in the early 1990s who comes home to apathy, estrangement, and loss on behalf of his family, lover and friends. Brutally honest, direct, and meaningful, Prayer At Rumayla is a compelling novel of coming to terms not only with dangers and traumas of the battlefront, but with its aftermath upon the lives of the surviving combatants.

As a former member of C-4-64 Armor and M1 crewman, this book accurately depicts the nightmares faced during the Gulf war: many of those nightmares candy-coated for public view every night on CNN. But for the veterans who actually lived the life, Sheehan-Miles's book describes with dead-on accuracy the life and feel of an American armor soldier during the Gulf War. Reading the book I could picture myself on the back deck of the M1 again, feel the grit in my teeth, hair, clothes...everywhere. I could feel myself riding low in the loaders hatch, constantly traversing to scour the surrounding environment for the enemy. I could hear the pings of small arms rounds hitting the sides of the tank and could smell the sharp aroma of the round discharging downrange. The character, Chet Brown, is easy to relate to, although it is easy to dislike him in an odd sense. I wanted nothing more than to hold him down physically and urge him to communicate his thoughts and feelings, good and horrific. But as Chet so accurately relates in the book, "How do you answer a question like that?" (Referring to the oft-asked question, "What was it like?").
A quick read and a little raw in parts, but nonetheless a wonderful book about the emotional baggage that many vets brought home with them from Iraq.

Brian Schulz
C-4-64 Armor Veteran and M1 Crewman

Here is a copy of the e-mail I sent to the author.

Dear Mr. Sheehan-Miles,

I have just finished reading Prayer at Rumayla at felt compelled to write and tell you how much I enjoyed it. Not since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have I been moved by a characters' plight.

Your depiction of Chet Brown's struggle to re-integrate into society (no doubt based on your own experiences) highlights the biggest dichotomy of the modern military. In war, one is encouraged to kill, is rewarded with praise, medals and promotions and yet back in "the world" killing is regarded as amoral and an inherently evil act. At the same time the public celebrates the soldier and yet criticises his actions on the battlefield.

This contradiction, or should that be hypocrisy, is one of the biggest blocks to the combat veteran's re-integration into society and the story of Chet Brown and his comrades brings this home with shocking and disturbing force.

I commend you on your work and eagerly look forward to the release of Insurgent. You are rapidly becoming one of my favourite and most anticipated authors.

Yours sincerely,

Barrie Suddery.

Being a fellow vet, I relived the experience through this book. A must read for any vet whom was there, and anyone who wants to know what it was "truly" like over there. CNN painted a pretty picture of this war, but through this book you will see it through the eyes of a soldier.

Charles Sheehan-Miles, Prayer at Rumayla (Xlibris, 2001)

I had some trepidations before cracking the cover on this one; with a very few notable exceptions, I've never been much of one for war novels, which tend to either fall into the knee-jerk anti-war camp or the "sis-boom-bah rah-rah-rah" camp. Prayer at Rumayla leans towards the left side of the division, but prefers to let the images and events therein do its preaching, which already puts Sheehan-Miles ahead of 95% of the pack. Despite the book's "A novel of the Gulf War" subtitle, this is more a case of the Gulf War being a driving force for the main character's actions after he's back in the U.S. after combat.

Chet Brown, a tank loader in the Gulf War, is home after a particularly nasty engagement in Iraq. While there, he had no real goals other than to get home; now that he's back, he keeps wondering if he can go back over. His dissatisfaction with his former life and the changes in both himself and those around him lead him to spend a month's leave travelling, rather than staying in Georgia, and the three central chapters of the novel (about half the book) recount Chet's trip to New York and back.

More than anything, this is a roadtrip novel, with the usual conventions of the genre. Chet finds out about himself by meeting a series of others who reflect various parts of his personality (the obvious comparison is to On the Road here, but I found my mind drawn to various post-Vietnam novels, especially those of Lucius Shepard and J. K. Flowers rather than the land-of-Camelot stuff Kerouac was on about). However, Sheehan-Miles makes one big departure from the genre (to say what would be a plot spoiler), and that gives the book a freshness and realism that are unexpected in the modern road novel. The book is unpredictable because it plays on the predictability of its genre, and the (lack of) twist at the end is all the more powerful for not bowing to convention.

My only real problems with the book have nothing to do with the narrative itself. There are a rash of proofreading errors and more than one case where an editor should have slapped the author upside the head for sentence construction problems. Neither is overly common, however (one crops up every ten pages or so), and so the distraction value is kept to a minimum.

A promising first novel. Hopefully we'll be seeing more. *** 

Charles Sheehan-Miles, a Gulf War combat veteran decorated for valor, scores a direct hit with his first novel, "Prayer at Rumayla."

His accurate, authentic, and unvarnished view of the shrieks, groans, horrors, and hell of combat between the U.S. and Iraq in 1991 provides a rare and illuminating glimpse into the heart of an M1A1 Abrams tank crewman.

With his laser-guided view from behind a 120mm cannon and .50 machine gun, Charles keeps faith with Gulf War combat veterans by telling it like it was, not only as a master storyteller, but with a gut-level emotional portrayal worthy of comparison with Leon Uris' "Battle Cry."

"Prayer at Rumayla" provides large caliber ammunition to the rarely heard voices of front-line Gulf War combat veterans searching for understanding in a clueless and insulated world, and the novel may provide an opportunity for some veterans to come to terms with living life after dispensing death.

As Charles' friend for more than 9 years, I know that "Prayer at Rumayla" gives readers the first-hand details left out of other books about the Gulf War -- the book is a "one of a kind."

As the U.S. prepares to send hundreds of thousands more young men and women into another war in Southwest Asia, his book is a must-read for potential recruits and government policymakers who never set foot on a modern day battlefield.

- Paul Sullivan
Cavalry Scout, 1st Armored Division
Gulf War Veteran