Review by New York Times Review
FOR five years American soldiers manned a series of outposts in what was perhaps the most hostile corner in all of Afghanistan. The place was the Korangal Valley, which unfolds beneath the crags and terraced ridges of Kunar Province about 25 miles from the border with Pakistan. The idea was to put Americans on the ground to intercept Taliban fighters who were passing through to fight in other parts of the country. It worked, sort of: the Korangal became a magnet for insurgents, if not much else. Resident Korangalis loathed the Americans, whom they regarded as invaders. American soldiers got into firefights whenever they stepped outside the ramparts. Only six miles long, the Korangal Valley is a tiny place, yet 42 American soldiers have died in it. Sebastian Junger, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of "The Perfect Storm," spent months shadowing an American infantry platoon deployed in the valley between 2007 and 2008. The result is "War," his absorbing and original if sometimes uneven account of his time there. The best way to describe Junger's book is to say what it is not. "War" does not attempt to explain the strategy behind the American war in Afghanistan, or the politics of Afghanistan, or even the people of the Korangal Valley. As the action unfolds, Junger makes no attempt to connect it to anything else happening inside the country. Instead, he uses the platoon (the second of Battle Company, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade) as a kind of laboratory to examine the human condition as it evolved under the extraordinary circumstances in which these soldiers fought and lived. And what a laboratory it is. The men of Second Platoon are young, heavily armed and crammed together inside a tiny mountain outpost supplied by helicopter and surrounded by enemies determined to get inside. Indeed, there aren't many places on earth where such intense and bizarre circumstances could be duplicated. Junger starts with the place itself. "The Korangal Valley," he explains, "is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off." Second Platoon's job, as with the rest of Battle Company, was to kill insurgents and, with whatever time they had left over, persuade the Korangalis they were friends. It was a hopeless task. During the time of its tour, Battle Company, a mere 150 out of 70,000 NATO troops, was experiencing a fifth of the combat taking place in the entire country. An American bunker in the Korangal Valley, June 2008. At one level, Junger's book is a chronicle of Second Platoon's days. He takes us up the mountains, along the valley floor, on helo-lifts, into firefights. We sit with the men in their bunks - infested with fleas and tarantulas - and we listen to their low-grade (and sometimes hilarious) philosophizing as they pass the hours. Junger captures some nice moments. Here is one, some months into the tour: "As the deployment wore on and they got pushed farther into enemy territory it was sometimes hard to tell you were even looking at American soldiers. They wore their trousers unbloused from their boots and tied amulets around their necks and shuffled around the outpost in flip-flops jury-rigged from the packing foam used in missile crates. Toward the end of their tour they'd go through entire firefights in nothing but gym shorts and unlaced boots, cigarettes hanging out of their lips." And here is Lt. Col. Bill Ostlund, the battalion's commander, instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan, "seemingly immune to heartbreak, way more knowledgable than most of the press corps that came through and capable of working 18 hours a day for 15 months straight," Junger writes: "He had such full-on enthusiasm for what he was doing that when I was around him I sometimes caught myself feeling bad that there wasn't an endeavor of equivalent magnitude in my own life." But Junger is aiming for more than just a boots-on-the-ground narrative of the travails of American fighting men. As the book's grandiose title suggests (along with its three sections, "Fear," "Killing" and "Love"), "War" strives to offer not just a picture of American fighting men but a discourse on the nature of war itself. This is no small ambition, and while Junger offers some incisive insights he does not always fulfill his larger goals. At times, Junger appears to use virtually every moment in the Korangal as the occasion for an extended riff. He tells us what happens to a soldier's body: levels of Cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, actually drop in trained soldiers during combat. He tells us about the unusual physics of fighting in the Korangal: you can see a gunshot but not have enough time to move before it hits you. He even tells us about the odor emitted by the men as their tour drags on: they reek of ammonia because their fat is gone and their bodies are burning muscle. And he writes some beautiful sentences about this ugly world. Here he is on Second Platoon's outpost. "It's a miraculous kind of antiparadise up here: heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait." Junger has found a novel and interesting lens through which to view the conflict in Afghanistan, and he captures many things a lesser writer might miss. But he pays a price for it. For one thing, the characters of Second Platoon sometimes disappear in Junger's digressions. Apart from the group's tough but vulnerable noncommissioned officer Sgt. Brendan O'Byrne, none of the men of the platoon come to life for very long. And for all the discussion of combat, there isn't enough of it in the book to sustain Junger's discussion. There's too much telling, not enough showing. The result is that for all its closeness to the men in the field, "War" lacks the emotional power it might have had if its characters had been described in more depth. Junger risked his life to be with the men of Battle Company's Second Platoon, but I would have liked to have heard a little more from them and a little less from Junger himself. "War" ends with Second Platoon, after 15 months and too many of its members killed or wounded, packing up and dispersing. Sergeant O'Byrne has a full-on mental collapse, as the release from mortal combat proves too much for him to bear. But perhaps the most poignant moment for the men of Battle Company occurred after "War" went to press. In April, the United States Army closed its bases in the Korangal Valley and sent the soldiers to other places. After five years of fighting and dying, American commanders decided the valley wasn't worth the fight. War indeed. The Korangal Valley is a tiny place, only six miles long, yet 42 American soldiers have died there. Dexter Filkins is a foreign correspondent for The Times. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Over the course of a year, Junger (The Perfect Storm, 1997) embedded himself with Second Platoon, Battle Company, operating out of the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, an inhospitable terrain inhabited by people inhospitable to American forces, where some of the heaviest combat has been fought. Junger took five trips to the valley in 2007 and 2008 to follow Second Platoon through much of their 15-month deployment. He experiences combat firsthand; witnesses firefights, ambushes, and casualties; and survives an IED that blew up the Humvee he was riding in. Second Platoon, considered the best-trained and . . . worst-disciplined, is known for their brawling as much as for their bravery. Junger examines the mind-set of the soldiers who exist on the tip of the spear, the nearly superhuman traits they embody, the challenges they face when they engage with the enemy and interact with locals, the boredom between battles, and the difficulties they have when they return to civilian life. For these young men, war, although costly, is an opportunity to truly live life to its fullest (and carry and fire weapons); the thrill of war by far trumps fear and sorrow and the drudgeries of civilian life. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers ; in combat, everything is important and nothing is taken for granted, where men don't feel the most alive . . . but the most utilized. While with Second Platoon, Junger, along with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, took hours of videotape, some of which became part of a feature-length documentary called Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize this year at Sundance.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"War is insanely exciting.... Don't underestimate the power of that revelation," warns bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Junger (The Perfect Storm ). The war in Afghanistan contains brutal trauma but also transcendent purpose in this riveting combat narrative. Junger spent 14 months in 2007-2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms-they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops-and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do-nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight-a response Junger struggles to understand-and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit. Junger mixes visceral combat scenes-raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion-with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire. (May 11) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Between 2007 and 2008, No. 1 New York Times best-selling author Junger (The Perfect Storm) followed a single platoon through a 15-month tour of duty in northeast Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. During that time he observed and experienced the war as these soldiers fought it. Junger himself narrates, and his unpolished voice and rather monotonous delivery make this production, at least initially, difficult to endure. But listeners will quickly warm to his narration -owing to the well-told and fascinating nature of his tale. A bonus interview with the author provides context to his work and presents him talking in a more informal setting. An arresting account recommended for public libraries and those libraries serving a military clientele. [The video footage documenting Junger's experience became the basis of the film Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival (see Video NewsBriefs, LJ 3/1/10); the New York Times best-selling Twelve: Hachette hc received a starred review, LJ 4/15/10.-Ed.]-Michael T. Fein, Central Virginia Community Coll. Lib., Lynchburg (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The latest flexing of journalistic muscle from Vanity Fair contributor Junger (A Death in Belmont, 2006, etc.).The author dives into the most perilous form of immersion journalism, attempting to create an unflinching account of frontline combat. The prototype of this approach is Michael Herr's peerless Dispatches (1977), a thoroughly unsentimental, grunt-level view of the Vietnam War's bloodiest years. Yet if Junger's dispatches from the fighting in Afghanistan solidify anything, it's that war American-style hasn't evolved much in the decades since Herr's book. It seems that neither advanced tactics nor postmillennial weapons technology have negated the all-too-human imperfections of face-to-face ground combat. From June 2007 to June 2008, Junger was embedded"entirely dependent on the U.S. military for food, shelter, security, and transportation"with the 173rd Airborne, a seasoned outfit assigned to secure the notoriously untamable Korengal Valley in Afghanistanmurderous terrain that the Soviets had found impassable 30 years before. The author singled out Sgt. Brendan O'Byrne as his primary focal point for the book. O'Byrne's no-nonsense attitude and bleak upbringinghe was shot by his own father in civilian lifeseemed most representative of the squad as a whole. As in The Perfect Storm (1997), Junger blends popular science, psychology and history with a breathlessly paced narrative. What's absent here is not only a significant political angle but also any big-picture questioning of what exactly these soldiers are fighting and dying for. Junger portrays the infantryman's life as one dominated solely by the most primitive group loyalty. It's this love for one's brothers-in-arms, the author concludes, that allows the soldiers to stir up the courage and selflessness necessary to function at optimum levels under fire.An often harrowing, though mostly conventional, account of the physical and psychological toll of modern warfare on the average soldier.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
