Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You reads much like Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds told from a woman veteran’s perspective. Like The Yellow Birds’ John Bartle, Be Safe I Love You protagonist Lauren Clay is a moody, out-of-sorts individual before enlisting in the Army, and like Bartle, traumatizing service in Iraq plunges her into madness upon return. To tell stories of lives ruined by war, Hoffman and Powers bend the language of narrative to stylistic extremes. Their prose is lyrical and suggestive, unafraid to leave the precincts of fact, logic, and linear chronology for both subtler and more sensational orders of meaning-making. Thematically, The Yellow Birds and Be Safe I Love You both assert that the aspect of war with the most potential to haunt veterans on return is failing to protect others for whom they felt responsible. John Bartle and Lauren Clay live through war, but soldiers very close to them do not.
But more than The Yellow Birds, the novel Be Safe I Love You really resembles is Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s classic tale of youth angst. Holden Caulfield, the hero of Catcher in the Rye, is beset by a self-imposed obligation to save his sister Phoebe from the terrors and hypocrisies of adult life. In Be Safe I Love You, Lauren’s own overdeveloped sense of obligation extends not just to Army compadres, but to her younger brother Danny, who still resides at home with their dysfunctional father. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden dreams of running away to the west with Phoebe; in Be Safe I Love You, Lauren schemes to travel to the frozen Canadian north with Danny. Nerves jangled by the intensity of war, Lauren now thinks the journey will rescue Danny from the comfortably numb bliss of 24/7 online life. The plan is not just quixotic but crazy, and some of the most poignant parts of Be Safe I Love You reflect Danny’s growing realization that his beloved older sister is no longer the trustworthy guardian on whom he once depended. Lauren’s military service brought nothing but pain, guilt, shame, and madness, and her plan to save Danny is a self-destructive fantasy that may kill him, too. It’s Lauren who needs saving, not Danny.
Lauren’s case is extreme, but Hoffman’s onto something, and she proceeds as if determined to find the reasons why the hero of her own novel does not inspire more sympathy. Lauren was always the responsible one, but now, her take-charge tendencies swollen by promotion to sergeant in the Army, she just comes on too strong all the time. “I couldn’t afford to be fucking sensitive,” Lauren harrumphs, “I had to get things done.” Later, Hoffman writes of Lauren’s mindset:
She’d come home to a world of fragile baby animals. Soft inarticulate wide-eyed morons with know-nothing epiphanies and none of them—not one of them—did what she said, which was beginning to grate on her, cut to the heart of how wrong things were. Still she could accept that these people didn’t know how to lead or follow, but they could at least shut up. If anyone owed her anything for serving in Iraq it was to shut the fuck up.
Lauren’s soldierly discipline and odd sense of mission, along with her arrogance and irritability, dismay her friends and family, while making her extremely difficult to help. A second problem is Lauren’s lingering guilt about joining the Army. “Because deep down they knew you were doing something wrong in the first place,” Lauren thinks, “All that training was not for rescuing kittens from trees.” Later, Lauren screams at her father when he tries to compare her service to their friend PJ’s in Vietnam:
“I’m not PJ. Understand? I didn’t get drafted. I wasn’t some sitting-target chump with eight weeks of basic. I enlisted. I was educated. I had people under my command…. I am a beneficiary of this war… We got paid… If you never make another dime I’ve saved still saved enough to put Danny through state school and pay his rent until he graduates.”
The implication here is that post-traumatic stress and other forms of contemporary veteran dysfunction are exacerbated by their victims’ knowledge that at some level they volunteered for and were compensated for what they now suffer. Be Safe I Love You’s portrait of Lauren’s deterioration is as bleak and cold as the New York state hinterlands and the far reaches of northeast Canada in which the novel is set. It suggests not that America needs to understand what ails its troubled veterans, but that such veterans themselves should slow down, listen to what people are trying to tell them, and figure out how and why they are scaring the friends and family to whom they have returned.
Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You. Simon and Schuster, 2014.
Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature 
I saw this book on the “new books shelf” at the library, so I jumped right in. About halfway through I turned it in. After I turned it in I went back to read Molin’s review. In the review he mentions that stylistically it is similar to Catcher in the Rye. Never could finish that one either.
To each his own, but I’d recommend you give both books a second chance!
So, I’m not even going to be embarrassed by how often I comment on this blog. I just finished Cara Hoffman’s book myself (part of this free online class I’m taking called ‘Reading Along with Time Now’). I appreciated a lot of things about it, and I think Hoffman is a poet. But I agree that there is a coldness to the narrative that kept me perpetually distanced from Lauren despite all her admirable qualities. Is it that the parts of her character didn’t quite seem to add up?
Also, this is not a literary criticism per se, but I think I am growing a little weary of the Helen Benedict school of thought (with all due respect to her for the work she has done). It’s this notion that anyone in the military is either a tool (enlisted) or a freaky predator (officer) — usually, someone to be pitied for the awful decision they made. (The idea, as you put it, that “military service brought nothing but pain, guilt, shame, and madness.”) I understand that this story can, in some cases, be very real, and I am not a cheerleader or apologist for the military, but it’s kind of starting to feel like the “shooting fish in a barrel” you mentioned — too easy a story to tell, and it ignores what I think are some of the very nuanced and interesting military stories, like all the Master Chiefs we know, for example, who might have grown up in relative poverty but made good lives for themselves and their families in the Navy. It also ignores the relationships that many American military personnel forge on the ground with people in the countries where they are stationed — relationships that are not always adversarial or violent but often based in genuine affection and goodwill, even if they are stunted by the confines of military business-as-usual.
Anyway, I enjoyed this review, and I never would have put together the Holden Caulfield connection myself — but now that you mention it, it’s staring me in the face.
Hi Andria, your comments are always welcome, but readers should do as I do and also keep an eye on your blog The Military Spouse Book Review as a complement to everything I talk about here. A few posts back, for instance, you wrote of a romance novel that featured soldiers deployed to Afghanistan, and I was struck how unlike (in a good way) the book was from the high-minded, more literary treatments of war I generally write about. Tis true that the main line of war lit tends to focus on damaged lives and the futility of conflict in ways that can after a while seem not just oppressive, but clichéd–a far worse sin in my book. There must be other stories to tell, but what are they and where do they come from??? One thing I’m trying to with Time Now is point out for the community of war writers and readers the general and characteristic subjects, themes, and perspectives that we’re seeing across the field. Not that anyone needs my help, but my fondest hope is that some grain of sand expressed here-in might be the irritant that, caught in the craw of a writer far more talented and creative than me, grows into a new pearl of originality and insight in some future work. That’s some heavy-duty metaphor-making for this early in the morning, so please excuse, but I hope to explain better in posts to come. Make it new, always make it new!