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We Pierce
by Andrew Huebner
Two Wars
A review by Adrienne Miller
We Pierce follows the same family from Huebner's very fine first novel, American by Blood. This frightening, formidable, and readable sequel is the dark story of two brothers, Smith and Sam Huebner, and the wars each fights. Their respective wars couldn't be any more contradictory. The year is 1990, and Smith is a tank commander in Desert Storm; the younger Huebner son, Sam, a struggling writer, finds his own form of action (he's a drunk and a drug addict) in New York. We Pierce, which is in large part autobiographical (the surname is, for starters, a pretty clear indication), alternates between Smith's life and Sam's during the course of an eight-month period. Smith is a sergeant — one of the most relentless soldiers in tank company D — but he's suffering pangs of conscience; Sam protests against the war, marching from New York to Washington, while his drug habit gets more and more out-of-control and terrifying. Like all true works of art, We Pierce doesn't provide any easy answers, and cannot be easily categorized as either pro- or anti-war. What it does do is present the despair, sacrifice, and ambivalence of war as powerfully as a novel possibly can.
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