Samuel Finlay’s Breakfast with the Dirt Cult (the meaning of the title is not obvious and never explained) is a thinly-veiled autobiographical account, dressed up as fiction, of an enlisted soldier’s experience in the U.S. Army, specifically, in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s. When the idea to review this now nine-year-old book occurred to me, before the United States’s disastrous withdrawal in August, I had thought I would need to make some justifying remarks as to why a book so old—self-published to boot—warranted a review in 2021. It may now seem that, with Afghanistan so spectacularly back in the news, such a justification is no longer needed. But the question of why this book still needs to be answered.
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