War

Philip Caputo

With his narrative gifts and vivid prose — as free, thank God, of literary posturing as it is of war-correspondent chest-thumping — Junger masterfully chronicles the platoon's 15-month tour of duty...Junger makes us see the terror, monotony, misery, comradeship and lunatic excitement that have been elements of all wars since, say, the siege of Troy. He thus becomes a kind of 21st-century battle singer, narrating the deeds and misdeeds of his heroes while explaining what makes them do what they do...It's the best writing I've seen on the subject since J. Glenn Gray's 1959 classic, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. . . . Junger's sketches of the men are deft, his ear for their quirky speech (aided by video recordings) spot on . . . This splendid book should help the rest of us understand them — and war itself — a little better.
— Washington Post

Dexter Filkins

Absorbing and original . . . Junger is aiming for more than just a boots-on-the-ground narrative of the travails of fighting men . . . . 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 . . . He writes some beautiful sentences about this ugly world.
— New York Times Book Review

Marjorie Miller

With his blue-eyed, chiseled and starting-to-grizzle looks, Junger is just the specimen Hollywood would cast as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan to ensure a box office hit...But to assume that Junger had easy access diminishes his reporting skills and his commitment to the story. At age 48, he's a generation older than most of the soldiers he accompanied into combat over the course of their 15-month deployment and who instinctively put up their guard against an outsider...The resulting book is written in the first person, but it is observational, offering no critique of the combat he witnessed, taking no position on the efficiency, logic or value of the war. He offers a close-up view of men and the raw elements of war: fear and courage, killing and death, love and brotherhood.
— Los Angeles Times

Eugene Robinson

It is a gripping account of how modern warfare is experienced by those who do the fighting, and its focus is that of a laser, not a floodlight . . . WAR is full of stories that prove the adage about all politics being local.
— Washington Post

Dexter Filkins

…absorbing and original…
—The New York Times

Philip Caputo

With his narrative gifts and vivid prose—as free, thank God, of literary posturing as it is of war-correspondent chest-thumping—Junger masterfully chronicles the platoon's 15-month tour of duty. But what elevates War out of its particular time and place are the author's meditations on the minds and emotions of the soldiers with whom he has shared hardships, dangers and spells of boredom so intense that everyone sits around wishing to hell something would happen (and wishes to God it was over when, inevitably, it does)…These reflections, drawing on his wide-ranging research into military history, biology and psychology as well as on his personal experiences, overreach once or twice. Otherwise, it's the best writing I've seen on the subject since J. Glenn Gray's 1959 classic, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle.
—The Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

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 Afghanistan-murderous 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 upbringing-he was shot by his own father in civilian life-seemed 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, theauthor 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.

Publishers Weekly

Junger delivers a closeup examination of the American war in Afghanistan during his travels with the military, often on the frontlines. The choice for Junger to read stems from his firsthand knowledge (and the implicit belief he can convey that orally). However, his slightly nasal tone and drab delivery make the audiobook unimpressive. He lacks the emphasis and energy to do his prose justice, thus, despite an awe-inspiring text, his narration might leave listeners bored or uninterested. A Twelve hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 15). (May)

Library Journal

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

The Barnes & Noble Review

In mid-April, the U.S. military executed what it called a "strategic withdrawal" from Korengal, a small valley in northeast Afghanistan that it had tried for four years to pacify. Dozens of U.S. soldiers and many more Afghans had died violently there. When the U.S. pulled out, the valley was still so dangerous that officers had to offer village elders six thousand gallons of fuel as a bribe not to attack the convoys during their drive to safety.

This is about as close to an acknowledgment of defeat as one is likely to see in this war. Sebastian Junger's new book, War, is a depiction of one year in the life of the U.S. soldiers who tried to turn the occupation of Korengal around, and whose battle against a steady barrage of Taliban attacks was eventually judged to be not worth the trouble. Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and a reporter for Vanity Fair, visited Korengal's forts and outposts serially for one year, and his dispatches present a sometimes unbearably gritty look at the daily life of soldiers there. As a narrative of combat in Afghanistan from the U.S. ground perspective, the book has no rivals. It makes one wonder how any army could hold ground in Korengal, and indeed why it would even want to.

The Korengal of Junger's narrative is "an Afghanistan within Afghanistan," crystalizing all the violence and enmity of that country in a divot of earth just six miles long. The local people are completely uninterested in helping their occupiers. The fighters among them are hellbent on overrunning the bases, not only to kill Americans but also to carry off their corpses as prizes. The strategic value of the valley is essentially nil, because it is not really on the road to anywhere; only six thousand people live there. Its sole products, timber and wheat, are not particularly lucrative. Some say Korengal has a sort of "flypaper" role, and attracts fighters who might cause even more damage elsewhere. But none of the explanations is convincing (invocation of flypaper is always a sign of strategic bankruptcy). At one point a soldier tells Junger that the base he commands is really just "a huge middle finger pointed at the Taliban fighters in the valley," a monument to remind them that shooting Americans will only make them fight harder, until now at least.

With that middle finger now publicly amputated, one might ask what force of will kept it extended for so long. In Junger's telling, the effort was horrendous, and the stresses it put on American soldiers nearly unimaginable. In several engagements, the Americans take more than fifty percent casualties, and Junger is unflinching in reporting the worst of them, particularly the head shots (usually a quick death) and the "bleed-outs" (ripped arteries, which only a swiftly applied tourniquet can save). His accounts of the few times when Taliban have literally overrun outposts, breaching their walls and shooting freely among the soldiers, are particularly harrowing, and produce the bulk of the American body count in these pages.

The narrative is always compelling but at times difficult to take, for reasons both of squeamishness (though rarely gory, the accounts are wrenching) and of emotional drain. Junger has deliberately ignored strategic questions in favor of an intense and sustained soldier's-eye view. And while that view does justice to the boredom of base life, it does pack into just a couple hundred pages a full year of death and mayhem, which simply cannot be processed by anyone in the level of detail at which he offers it. Just as a war movie that showed only the most intense scenes of battle (think of the Omaha Beach scenes of Saving Private Ryan drawn out over a full two hours) would be unwatchable, by its own potency Junger's book is rendered unreadable in large doses.

That, perhaps, is the goal. The book is less about fighting with the brain than about fighting with the muscles and glands, and taxing them beyond what they can normally sustain. The soldiers with whom Junger embeds do not care about politics. They are endlessly practical and look for any way at all to bear the physical and psychological burdens of their situation. They know that if you cut off your shirt below the armpit you will stay cool, yet appear still to be in uniform, under your body armor. They know how to sustain bucket-loads of stress hormones in their systems, in anticipation of a wave of Taliban attacks. And they know that wearing flea-collars on your ankles doesn't do much to protect you against Afghan fleas, who on every forward base I have visited have been roughly as ferocious and bloodthirsty as the humans.

This practicality is at times unnerving. The soldiers are concerned at every moment with survival, and that fierce reality reduces them temporarily to bundles of instincts, capable of being described in the language of machines, or as sums of their chemically constituent parts. Junger says they reek of ammonia, because in the course of fighting in nearly a hundred pounds of combat gear they quickly burn off their bodies' natural grease and start burning muscle, with ammonia as a malodorous byproduct. In firefights they live or die by their reaction speed, like machines or robots. Junger looks up the neurobiology (there is a surprising amount of academic research in this book, though it is worn lightly) and does the math, finding that one might feasibly dodge a bullet, if it is coming from more than ten football fields away.

What does all this amount to? The book certainly explains less than its grandiose, single-word title promises. (The section headings, equally grandiose, are "Fear," "Killing," and "Love." Why this extremely specific and detailed book requires these general and pretentious headings is a mystery.) There are no Afghans with prominent roles in the narrative, even among the Americans' comrades in the Afghan National Army, so it would be a strain to claim that it revealed much about the Afghan war as a whole, or about Afghanistan as a country -- although since Junger suggests that the Korengal, that unfriendly and valueless place, is a microcosm for Afghanistan, one wonders whether the strategic withdrawal portends one on a larger scale. In the end, and especially with the ignominious coda of last month's base closing, War reads as a melancholy tale of frustration, an account of an inexorable slide toward defeat, with many dead and damaged, physically and psychologically. To foreclose the possibility of a sequel, six thousand gallons of diesel is nothing short of a bargain.

--Graeme Wood