OBSERVER Photo by Jade Ramsey Schlich Former U.S. Marine and National Book Award Finalist, Elliot Ackerman, reads from his newest novel, “Dark at the Crossing.”

Former U.S. Marine and National Book Award Finalist, Elliot Ackerman, read from his newest novel, Dark at the Crossing, recently at SUNY Fredonia.

Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and is the recipient of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic and Ecotone, among others. “Dark at the Crossing” is a finalist for the National Book Award.

Ackerman’s novel, “Dark at the Crossing,” is set in Turkey just on the border of Syria, and follows a young Iraqi-American on his quest for purpose. Haris Abadi does not know why he must go fight against Bashar al-Assad. But after he finds himself robbed, he meets a married Syrian couple, who are struggling with loss, grief, and a lack of purpose just as he is.

“Dark at the Crossing” began after Ackerman returned from visiting friends in Turkey. He began describing an horrific scene to friend and author, Ben Fountain, where he witnessed the regime overturning a town just across the border into Syria. That’s when Fountain told him to write about it.

“Sometimes I’d be writing about what happened and then I’d start writing what could have happened, and that’s fiction. And that became the bones and the scaffolding upon which is my opening scene of the book. It’s like a strand and then you start following that strand and then it leads to the next and the next and the next. And you’re doing it on faith that the story will just keep revealing itself to you. And when it goes well, it does,” Ackerman said.

His novel interweaves narratives of children who have experienced tremendous loss and are confused in the midst of war. Ackerman discussed his feelings of the nature of war and when he first realized what it was all about.

“I never understood war until I had my first kid. And I only say that because I would see something hard or difficult and I would see something like a kid hurt or see a kid lost a parent and I was 26-years-old and young and single and I would say yeah that’s horrible, but it never really registered to me until I had my own kid to understand. And what I came to understand was a simple equation: wars don’t perpetuate the ideology of the war. You’re fighting because of loss. When certain people lose enough, there’s no making them whole after that. If I were fighting for the Free Syrian Army, and the regime came and attacked and killed my daughter, I, emotionally understand. I would be lost and I would take my rifle and go to the mountains and try to kill as many of them as I could until they killed me. I would be done. You reach a threshold where people have lost so much that they cannot be made whole again. And when they cannot be made whole, the war perpetuates itself again. You want to look at idea of loss and the most precise aperture to do it through is the eyes of a child.”

Ackerman also talked about how fiction humanizes those peoples we don’t understand. He called it, “emotional transference.”

“So I write a book and it winds up in your hands and you read that scene and you feel something, maybe not one hundred percent of what I felt, but some fraction of it. I have transferred my emotions over to you. It’s remarkable; you can do that across cultural barriers, barriers of age. That emotional transference is an assertion of our shared humanity. It’s an incredibly optimistic act.”

Ackerman’s reading was sponsored by the English Department’s Mary Louise White Fund, the Department of Politics and International Affairs, The Veterans Office and Honors Program.