Jagged Wire

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan, 2010. A small New Zealand Army team holds a forward post in a valley where the wind carries voices across distances that shouldn't be possible, and where a single decision can cost more than anyone is willing to admit. Staff Sergeant Noah Ngata leads men who have learned to go quiet instead of falling apart. When they choose to save one girl, they learn exactly what that choice costs everyone else. Mohammad, their interpreter, carries two languages and two worlds inside him. Forood, an Afghan National Police officer, becomes an unlikely ally in a war with no clean answers. Jagged Wire is a literary, military novel about duty, moral injury, and the weight of decisions made in impossible circumstances, in the tradition of Tim O'Brien, Phil Klay, and Kevin Powers, told with a distinctly Southern Hemisphere voice. Beyond the wire, no one walks away clean.