PRINT
EMAILTwelve, 2010, 287 pp.
War. Simple as that. Put those three letters on the cover of your book, superimposed over a closely cropped image of an American soldier whose eye has seen the likes of Hell, and you have yourself a surefire bestseller. War, by Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm, 1997), reads like the action he covered: quick-fired, dirty, addictive. Yet Junger oversells his book with the simple title. A book about war in general or a particular war this is not. Instead, it is a book about combat, but a riveting one at that.
Those voyeurs, like me, who have never seen war but are drawn to reports from the front lines will enjoy Junger’s report from Afghanistan. In the same vein as Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers (Scribner, 2009), the reader is given front row seats to a war as far away as a war can possibly be, in a land that is as remote. Those wishing further insight into the wider war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan, for that matter), or for perspectives from Afghan soldiers, Taliban fighters, local villagers, or the State Department, look elsewhere. For grander sweeps of the history of war, war in Afghanistan in general, or American war history, look elsewhere. For insights into day-to-day, deadly combat, look no further. (A documentary by Junger and Tim Hetherington based on footage shot in the Korengal Valley, Restrepo, won 
accolades at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.)
War would be more honest if it were titled, Combat. Junger, who journeyed to Afghanistan five times between 2007-08 reports on fighting in the wickedly hostile Korengal Valley, “the Afghanistan of Afghanistan.” The scenes are harrowing. Thrilling, even. War, as I reported at PEN World Voices Festival recently, where Junger anchored a panel on war-reporting, makes for good writing.1 There is, as Junger said during the panel discussion, something appealing about war that attracts the male psyche. Junger, too, was drawn to Afghanistan, for some reason. Some, after all, consider war the ultimate test of “manhood.” He admits as much in War:
It’s a foolish and embarrassing thought but worth owning up to. Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily—that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind—but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing else you’d rather do.
The men of Battle Company experience a hell that I neither can fathom, nor do I care to experience. Daily they dodge random sniper fire, mortars, and ambushes, and nightly the soldiers fall asleep (if they fall asleep) to the very real nightmare that their tiny outpost will be overrun by enemy forces. Sipping a cup of coffee. Cooking a meal. Sleeping on a cot. Relieving oneself. Any and every activity these men do could be their very last. They are surrounded by a fierce, hostile, relentless enemy that is willing to die by the scores to see that the Americans leave their territory without victory.
The men of Battle Company live (and die) without electricity, hot water, the presence of women, or comfort of any sorts. Their only distraction from the constant “waiting” to fight is the actual fighting. So much combat happens that by the time Junger has completed his last embed, the men fight in their underwear with cigarettes or toothbrushes dangling from their mouths, caught so often doing otherwise “normal” activities.
War is succinctly a book about one platoon in one very remote place in Afghanistan. It is about fifteen months of constant combat. It is about the brotherhood and bond that forms between the American soldiers throughout their ordeal, a brotherhood and bond as ancient as the unholy craft itself. It is about combat—combat in very tight quarters. I’m talking calling in airstrikes from war machines that belch firepower. I’m talking jammed weapons and shooting so much that gun barrels melt. I’m talking a huddle of buildings infested with fleas, where madness is contagious, and quasi-homoerotic behavior is prevalent. Living and fighting in the Korengal Valley seems otherworldly. Indeed, if a new edition were being considered for Richard Holmes’ Acts of War (Free Press, 1985), a collection of accounts of men in battle, much of Junger’s book would serve adequately for a chapter on contemporary fighting.
The back cover of War is reminscent of Michelangelo's "Battle of the Centaurs."
reminiscent
“As for a sense of purpose,” Junger writes,
combat is it—the only game in town. Almost none of the things that make life feel worth living back home are present at Restrepo [the outpost], so the entire range of a young man’s self-worth has to be found within the ragged choreography of a firefight. The men talk about it and dream about it and rehearse for it and analyze it afterward but never plumb its depths enough to lose interest. It’s the ultimate test, and some of the men worry they’ll never again be satisfied with a “normal life”—whatever that is—after the amount of combat they’ve been in. They worry that they may have been ruined for anything else.
One of the more gripping recollections of battle come from an American outpost north in Korengal Valley. The Taliban planned a bold attack to overrun the small base. Part of the description is worth quoting at length.
The signal to attack was two long bursts from a heavy machine gun. That was immediately followed by waves of rocket-propelled grenades that took out or suppressed every heavy weapons system at the base. There was so much fire coming in that the mortar tubes were sparkling with bullet strikes and none one could get near them. A grenade hit the missile truck almost immediately and set it on fire. The Americans were instantly outnumbered and outgunned and shooting so much that the barrels of their guns were melting. A sergeant named Hector Chavez, who had already been through Ranch House, saw a Taliban fighter climbing a tree outside the wire so he shot him. Another fighter started climbing the tree so Chavez shot him too. After Chavez shot his third man they finally abandoned the tree and tried something else.
An RPG hit near the mortar pit and tore up a mortar man named Sergio Abad with shrapnel. …Now Abad found himself lying wounded in the mortar pit handing ammo to Chavez, who was busy firing over the tops of the sandbags. The 120 mm mortars, which have a killing radius of seventy yards, caught fire, and Chavez and another man grabbed Abad and started pulling him to safety. Halfway across the base they took a burst of machine-gun fire and Chavez went down, shot in both legs. He continued crawling toward cover, pulling Abad behind him, until several men at the command post ran out and rescued them. …The blazing missile truck finally exploded, engulfing an Afghan soldier in flames and sending antitank missiles tumbling across the base.
…The first barrage of grenades had slammed into the position and wounded or incapacitated every man there. The grenades kept coming and blowing men out of their positions and even the helmets off their heads.
And on and on. For pages Junger recounts the deadly battle in which nine American soldiers perished. It is adrenaline-fused war reporting at its best.
As Junger starts to wind down his gripping report on Battle Company, the journalist ruminates a little on the distinction between “war” and “combat.” “War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter,” he says. Why he insisted on titling his book as such, then, remains a mystery, for clearly Junger realizes the distinction between the two phenomena. The same goes for the grandiose titles of the three sections that make up the book: Fear, Killing, and Love. None of the section heads is adequately addressed and seem to have little to do with material in the chapters that follow each heading.
Clearly War is a book about combat in modern day Afghanistan between a juggernaut military and a ragtag enemy. Both sides bring their advantages to the fight in Korengal Valley. It remains to be seen, however, which of the tactical disadvantages will yield to the strengths of the other. “Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with,” Junger says. But clearly, a game it is not.
One takeaway from reading War is that it’s not so much combat that seems endearing, but of surviving the battle that remains the psychotic fix. Escaping near-death circumstances is the reaffirmation that one is still alive, and has survived the ultimate test. But after that, what next?
June 10, 2010
frontispiece: detail of "Battle of the Centaurs" by Michelangelo
1. See War of the Words here.
