War on Terror

The War on Terror is the historical frame for Jessica Mastriani’s account of being sent to Afghanistan to help locate people hidden in the mountains, and for the trauma that follows her home. The novel contrasts the war as a distant news story with Jessica’s direct participation: she does not merely hear reports of the missing, the dead, or the fighting, but helps identify where searchers should go. The period’s decisive significance in her story lies in that passage from extraordinary wartime usefulness to an altered, sleepless return.

The War as Lived Experience

Jessica describes how, for many Americans, the war existed at a remove, in nightly news reports about U.S. Marines killed and suspected terrorists found in caves. Her own experience overturns that distance. She says she saw the war live because she was the person directing searchers toward caves where people might be found. The contrast makes the conflict more than a backdrop: it is the circumstance that puts her unusual ability into active use and exposes her to events she later struggles to live with.

Her work began at home and continued later from Washington. When searchers returned saying they had found nobody at the locations she supplied, Jessica remained certain that the failure was theirs, not her power’s. Eventually she asked to be sent to the field so she could show them where to look herself. That shift from giving directions at a distance to going there in person marks how the demands of the war drew her further into its immediate realities.

Searches and Their Uneven Outcomes

The people Jessica located did not all have the same fate. Some cases became public through the news; others remained secret. Some people were too deep in the mountains for searchers to reach, while others were kept under observation as events were allowed to play out. Some were found dead. Jessica’s account therefore distinguishes finding someone from rescuing or recovering them: her ability could identify a person’s location, but it could not guarantee access or a living outcome.

Even amid those different results, Jessica maintains that she found everyone she was asked to find. The repeated assertion gives her wartime work a stark measure of success, while the outcomes attached to individual searches prevent that success from reading as uncomplicated triumph. The war depends on her accuracy, but accuracy cannot undo the danger surrounding the people she locates.

Trauma and the Return Home

After the searches came nightmares, and Jessica could no longer sleep. Because her ability depended on dreaming, the loss of sleep also stopped her from finding people. The account thus links the psychological aftermath directly to the mechanism that had made her useful in the first place: trauma interrupts both rest and the power through which she had served the wartime effort.

The condition is identified as posttraumatic stress syndrome, or PTSS. Attempts to help her included drugs, therapy, and a week beside a pool in Dubai, but none restored her sleep. In the end, she was sent home in the hope that returning to familiar surroundings might help. Instead, she found that things were different. Later, Rob Wilkins recognizes the depth of that change, telling her that she had seen things no one her age—or any age—should have seen and had come back broken. Jessica privately accepts that part of her returned altered, and that the damage reached beyond the loss of her ability to find people in her sleep.

Narrative Significance

The novel presents the War on Terror through an intimate retrospective account rather than as a broad military history. A newspaper profile about the government’s unorthodox methods of combating terrorism appears in Rob Wilkins’s scrapbook about Jessica, placing her personal story within public attention to the conflict while emphasizing that her own experience cannot be reduced to a headline. The war supplies the circumstances for her extraordinary work, but its lasting importance is measured by what follows: nightmares, lost sleep, an interrupted ability, and Jessica’s sense that home no longer means a return to normal.