Un periodista (autor de La tormenta perfecta, por cierto) pasa unos meses "empotrado" en una unidad de infantería destacada en un remoto puesto del valle de Korengal, cerca de la frontera afgana con Pakistán. Desde allí, mientras cuenta las actividades diarias de la tropa, reflexiona largo y tendido sobre la guerra y la condición humana. Podía haberles dedicado más tiempo a las reflexiones de los soldados y menos a las suyas propias, pero es un libro muy interesante. La unidad con la que vive está formada por 150 de los más de 70.000 hombres que hay en el país, y a pesar de ello reportó el 20% de los combates en los que hubo implicadas tropas estadounidenses. El puesto donde están, pequeño y aislado, abastecido por helicóptero y rodeado de enemigos que querían arrasarlo, se llama Restrepo, en honor a un médico militar previamente destinado en él, y cuya historia se nos cuenta.
Todo el libro es interesante, y el estilo es rápido, conciso y agradable. Lectura recomendada.

I don't know what I can say to do this book justice. It's one of the best looks at the human condition I've read. Junger breaks down the experience of combat into three sections: Fear, Killing and Love. As disparate as these themes may seem, they are unified by a tight narrative with insightful observations. The lessons on history and the research into psychological studies were also appreciated.

Junger spent 5 months off an on of a 15 month deployment embedded with Battle Company, 2nd Battalion of the 173rd Airborne in the Korengal Valley in the eastern province of Kunar in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, and this book is part of the result. A heartfelt and well researched book about the life of these young men fighting for our country. This is now my favorite of Jungers books (I haven't read A Death in Belmont), the story of the soldiers of Battle Company are fairly told and, being based on actual interviews with his subjects, has a personal touch that The Perfect Storm, was lacking. The impact of war on the men and the positive and negative aspects of their combat experience puts a powerful "small picture" face on the war in Afghanistan that you don't often hear about on the general coverage of the war.

Fairly objective on my opinion. Good read for the average American to grasp a bit of understanding about the service and sacrifice of our men in uniform.

Listening to this as an audiobook, and other than the fact that the futility and horror of the war in Afghanistan consistently makes me want to drive off the road, I'm really enjoying it so far...

... and it only got better from there. Junger's voice -- both speaking and writing -- is wonderfully evocative, and tracing his journey with an individual platoon over the course of five separate visits was truly amazing. It humanized the soldiers and the war in a way nothing else ever has for me.

I love book club because it makes me read books I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. The people in this book are very different from me and very far removed from my (small) experience with military. Most of the people I know who go into the military do it through ROTC to pay for graduate school (dental, medical, law), none that have ever seen combat. I am not familiar with the stories of these men. I loved learning about the friendship, the loyalty, just how difficult war is. It made me think of higher level thoughts about peace, conflict and violence.

I was surprised that the reasoning behind the war isn't as important to the frontline men. I gained new insights, appreciation, and respect for those who put their lives on the line for us. In our book club discussion someone mentioned [b:Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging|28119237|Tribe On Homecoming and Belonging|Sebastian Junger|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1459114807s/28119237.jpg|47206763] and this book definitely inspired me to read it. I am really fascinated by the interpersonal relationships and the science/neurology. My only complaint is the writing was a bit disjointed, it wasn't written in a linear fashion which was a bit confusing to me.

There was a lot of language, as you'd expect. Lots of f-words. I wouldn't listen to this on an audiobook but reading it I kinda skipped the language. There was sexual/crude talk as you'd expect. The war scenes were definitely violent..

"Men who had arrived home after a year of combat were put on planes and flown back into the war. Morale plunged"

"It was a weird irony of the war that once you were here --or your son was-- the politics of the whole thing became completely irrelevant until very conservative families and very liberal ones --there were some -- saw almost completely eye to eye"

"Medics are renowned for their bravery, but the ones I knew described it more as a terror of failing to save the lives of their friends"

"Restrepo was extremely well liked because he was brave under fire and absolutely committed to the men. If you got sick he would take your guard shift; if you were depressed he'd come to your hooch and play guitar. He took care of his men in every possible way."

"Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else."

"The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound -- even defeat -- a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history."

"The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for him, but on what's best for the group."

"Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the cost of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat, the less inclined you are to question it)"

"As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to the that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever."

"Firemen are going to get killed. When they join the department they face that fact. When a man becomes a fireman his greatest act of bravery has been accomplished. What he does after that is all in the line of work."

"Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like profanity."

"What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing."

Junger really is a fantastic author. He has this amazing way of writing that immediately catches your attention and refuses to let you put the book down. Sometimes it can be a bad thing, since it forces one to choose between studying and reading one of his books for pleasure. . . anyways, I found this to be an incredibly well-written book and would highly recommend it to all.

The two most striking aspects of this book are the fact that what is described is still considered "modern" warfare, and that Junger and his fellow journalist were willing to place themselves on the battlefield in order to capture this experience. The fellow journalist whose name escapes me now, was tragically killed on assignment earlier this year. Which proves that the type of journalism he and Junger were doing. Placed on the ground in one of the most dangerous battlefields in the Middle East with no training and no weapons, Junger chronicles the tours of the soldiers he stays with. Includes detailed accounts of fire fights, missions and regular happenings at camp. It amazes me that what our soldiers go through is considered cutting edge military practice, and there's no surprise that the anger and fear these men admit to has changed them permanently. The story isn't always thrilling, but the moments that are will freeze you where you stand. For those of us like me who had loved ones overseas and little experience with what it's truly like to serve your country, it was a heart stopping account. It was difficult for me, I will admit, to keep all of the men's names and personalities straight. The book doesn't run like a story, Junger is a journalist, and he writes like one. The flipping around and from different men's accounts can get confusing in print. I saw "Restrepo," the documentary Junger created in the same time, and it cleared all of my confusion up. It's the same story, location and men and it is arresting the entire time. I would recommend seeing the documentary after reading this. The documentary really supplemented the book. I haven't read "A Perfect Storm" but Junger seems to have a knack for this type of material. And you can't deny that he's willing to do anything in order to understand and capture his subject. I'd read another book by him. After reading this account in some ways, I hope I never have to.

I have read quite a few books of this type, either embed or first person accounts including
[b:No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah|206895|No True Glory A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah|Francis J. West Jr.|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320538268s/206895.jpg|200245], [b:Generation Kill|543103|Generation Kill|Evan Wright|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1309283182s/543103.jpg|908023], [b:Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad|55324|Thunder Run The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad|David Zucchino|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1319158343s/55324.jpg|53918] (all highly recommended). Here's the thing, I find these books informative and fascinating but it's kind of like seeing pictures of The Grand Canyon, it's just not the same as being there. So I'm not going to attempt to review this book. I'll just post some sections that spoke to me personally.


Battle Company is taking the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion is taking the most contact-by far-of any in the U.S. military. Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company. Seventy percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped in and around the Korengal Valley.



"It was the first time I'd seen one of ours like that," Sergeant Mac told me. "Besides Padilla, it was the first time I'd seen one of ours jacked up. When I helped get him into the truck I could see the life was gone. To move a body around that's just not moving was really odd. He was almost....foreign. That kind of thing gets put someplace deep, to be dealt with later."


In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out-can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose the importance of things, the gravity of things.



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 only reason anyone was alive at Restrepo-or at Aranas or at Ranch House or, later, at Wanat-was because every man up there was willing to die defending it.


When men say they miss combat, it's not that they actually miss getting shot at-you'd have to be deranged-it's that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.


The thing that existed at Restrepo but was virtually impossible to find back home wasn't so much combat as brotherhood. As defined by soldiers, brotherhood is the willingness to sacrifice one's life for the group.


The only thing left to say is, thanks. Thanks to those of you that have served and are currently serving.