The Gulf War is significant less as a continuous battlefield narrative than as a conflict whose public justifications and concealed consequences shape the novel’s present. It is invoked first as the prospect of a large military undertaking, then recalled through the service and experiences of soldiers whose histories have been obscured. The gap between confident public rhetoric and hidden violence gives the war its enduring force in the story.

Public Rationale and Political Stakes

The rhetoric surrounding the impending conflict is dismissive of the opposing force: one speaker describes its conscripts as poorly equipped and treats victory by Western armies as a foregone conclusion. When asked what would happen if the Western side lost, he refuses to treat defeat as a real possibility, while Wigwam counters that nobody could win a nuclear war. The exchange sets assured predictions of military superiority against a warning about the scale of destruction that modern weapons make possible.

The war is also presented as an opportunity with consequences beyond the battlefield. Its anticipated coverage is described as a means of exciting public attention, while the contracts and employment associated with military procurement promise substantial financial rewards. Later, C tells Howard that the country is prepared to take up arms to stop Michael Downey from speaking publicly, making the prospect of war part of the pressure surrounding the government’s attempt to contain him. The conflict therefore appears both as a public cause capable of commanding national attention and as a political setting in which disclosure is treated as a threat.

Soldiers, Casualties, and the Official Record

The war enters the lives of Sarah Trafford and Wigwam through the history of Maddy Singleton’s husband, Thomas Singleton. Wigwam reports that he fought in the Gulf War, but distinguishes that service from the circumstances in which he was said to have died: several years later, he was reportedly killed in a helicopter crash near Cyprus. In the account passed to Sarah, the crash killed six soldiers as well as members of the crew. The timing matters to Dinah Singleton’s story: she was only four, and had not yet been born when the soldiers died.

The report is shadowed by what it cannot establish. Thomas’s body was never recovered, a fact Sarah treats as making the official story embarrassing in retrospect. The information reaches her through a policeman who spoke to an intermediary in return for a charitable donation; soon afterward, he urged that the conversation be forgotten and offered the money back. The abrupt retreat makes an apparently settled military casualty report feel less like a closed account than a guarded one, while the absence of a body leaves the reported death unresolved.

Combat, Prisoners, and the Concealment of Responsibility

The war’s concealed history is most sharply exposed in Amos Crane’s recollection of Michael Downey and Tommy Singleton at Crows’ Hill, a camp for Iraqi prisoners where the two served as guards for three months near the end of the Gulf War. Singleton is remembered as the better soldier, but the account does not make military discipline a safeguard against atrocity. A group of prisoners had been captured at an Iraqi military compound where a torture chamber was discovered: electric batons, chains hanging from the ceiling, and a blood-streaked bathtub, though no bodies were found. Some argued that the missing bodies meant nothing because the victims had been buried. The uncertainty did not prevent violence from following.

One night, Singleton, Downey, and several others took three prisoners to the wire and shot them. Crane does not know, or care, whether the men were drunk or high; his account emphasizes that the killing was a choice made amid unresolved evidence and wartime impunity. The soldiers themselves could have been shot for it. Instead, because the war was popular and no one wanted to disrupt its public celebration, the affair was covered up. Singleton’s group was removed from Crows’ Hill and held in close confinement for the rest of the war. Afterward, the army struggled to decide what to do with them; they remained a potential scandal for years before being absorbed into special services and, later, placed in the hands of The Department. Their official deaths provided a blunt but useful cover story, erasing the soldiers as well as the record of what they had done.

Another account of the fighting brings the human cost into a different, immediate frame. Downey recalls trying with another soldier to speak to boy soldiers who knew almost no English beyond the word cigarette. Tommy Singleton had shot one of the boys; the soldiers bandaged his badly injured leg, but the treatment made no difference. Then a helicopter opened fire. They had, Downey says, expected it, yet the episode left him describing the boys not as real soldiers but as children. The sequence—an attempt to communicate, a wound that cannot be repaired, and fire from above—makes the distance between military labels and the people subjected to violence difficult to sustain.

Much later, Howard uses the prisoner killings to condemn Downey, telling Sarah Trafford that her friend had shot unarmed prisoners and was no better than a war criminal. The accusation is not a denial of the killing; it is deployed alongside a defense of the government’s own actions. Howard insists that Downey volunteered to be used as a guinea pig, and attributes the danger on the island to Downey going haywire rather than to the officials who wanted to bring him back into the fold. The war’s buried violence thus returns as an argument over responsibility: Downey’s past is real, but so is the state’s effort to exploit, contain, and disavow him.

The War as an Unfinished Record

The Gulf War persists in the novel less as a battlefield chronology than as a record repeatedly revised by those who need it to mean something different. Public confidence makes defeat unthinkable; military accounts turn missing bodies and suppressed killings into manageable official stories; later, the same buried history becomes a weapon in disputes over Downey’s credibility and the government’s responsibility. These versions do not cancel one another: the soldiers’ violence remains real, but so does the machinery that conceals it and later invokes it selectively. The war’s afterlife is therefore a struggle over who may be named, believed, or held accountable—a conflict that continues long after the fighting has ended.