Heart-stopping and incredibly tense. Nothing could really make you feel like you're actually in a battle situation, but this comes close.

Moving. Profound. Junger is a fantastic author that always knows when to leave things unsaid.

I don't know, the book was well written, and I plan on seeing the documentary, but there was something about this book that I couldn't quite get into.

I found Sebastian Junger's War to be a somewhat maddening read. Sections of this book are of 5-star quality, offering extraordinarily insightful observations about the physical and emotional impact of war on its warriors. But other sections are frustratingly disjointed---Junger flits from one topic to another (not to mention one tense to another) without any coherence.

Despite the book's frustrating passages, the 5-star sections are so informative and powerful that I would still recommend War as a worthwhile read to anyone interested in the topic.

A heavy read that delved into the mind of the soldier. I've never been to war, am military illiterate but this made so much sense to me. It takes a special person to a soldier let alone a soldier getting into a firefight every day. I get it now and I get them. The adrenaline rush that comes from a life or death situation it's unlike any other.

This is why we fight.....

This is not a pleasant read, but it does, I think paint a striking portrait of the experience of war (or at least of an experience of war). It consistently reminded me of, and gave context to, the famous maxim, "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." (3.5/5 stars.)

The most impactful sections of this text are the ones in which Junger is describing life in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan- what it is like for the men he is there with, how they behave, what they talk about. Similarly impactful (and, perhaps, more important) are Junger's explanations and explorations of what it means to be on the front lines in this way- how it affects men, what courage means, and how the lived experience of these men shapes them.

The descriptions are frequently harrowing. I cannot think of a similar text that has described violence in a manner at once so terrible and clear. I think it is (perhaps unsurprisingly) impossible for civilians like me to truly understand the experience of war (even if we work for the Department of Defense, or see the consequences of it after-the-fact), but this text does, at least, draw us a little closer to that experience.

I did not walk away from this text with the impression that the goal here was to valorize or glamorize these men or what they did. It would've been a shame to do that, I think, and significantly weakened the text and the text's purpose. I think the journalistic style of the prose does well by the topic and its subjects, and I think it does a good job of answering a question along the lines of, "What does it mean to send people off to war?"

The text is not without its flaws. Although Junger's discussions of the psychological consequences of what goes on are generally insightful, they sometimes feel as though they stray a bit too far into armchair psychologist territory, and those sections feel like the weakest of the book. Additionally, though he was certainly discussing a very specific place and time, some of his own particular biases seem implicitly quite clear. Things such as masculinity and masculine virtue, as well as the heteronormativity of the text are perhaps understandable in the context, but they are never really acknowledged and certainly never examined.

On the whole, though, this book is an effective- albeit disturbing- read. It is not, I think, a bad thing to complicate peoples' ideas of war and to invite further discussions on how we ought to conduct it (as Americans, as a society, as humans), and an emotional text such as this one (rather than, for example, a dry academic discourse) is not a bad place to start.

Good through and through. Sebastian Junger is a very gifted writer that has taken some pretty crazy risks to get this book to us. And then there is the research too. Quite moving stuff. Staggering. I feel that I understand more about war and also understand I will never know the most important aspects of war. In total, such a great book, an important book.

Just Say No

Young men have fantasies about being soldiers. But whatever it is they imagine combat to be, it isn’t this - the unremitting discomfort of heat, fleas, and filth; the obvious futility of all their efforts to do a job which is impossible; the unrecognized stress of being a continual target of bullets from the enemy, hate and suspicion from the local populace, and disdain by their superiors; the inevitable incompetence of those in command of a situation which they never comprehend; and the knowledge that the experience of numbness one is undergoing is fundamentally incommunicable to anyone who isn’t sharing it.

But young men seem never to get the eternally recurring message: This experience is likely to damage you beyond repair; it will haunt you and be the source of life-long regret. If you survive it with your body intact, your mind will have absorbed not just your own pain and degradation, but that of your friends and perhaps even your enemies. This pain and degradation will not make you a better man; it will make you an invalid. As Junger reports: “By the time the tour was over, half of Battle Company was supposedly on psychiatric meds.”

The further one is from those who are shot at and shoot back to kill, the more fantasy takes hold. Of course, the majority of a military force never actually know what’s going on: “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.” One need not go far up the chain of command to get the point: “It’s only on rear bases that you hear any belligerent talk about patriotism or religion.” Senior officers, faced with the unfamiliar, are at best incompetent and at worst seriously deluded: “...the war also diverged from the textbooks because it was fought in such axle-breaking, helicopter-crashing, spirit-killing, mind-bending terrain that few military plans survive intact for even an hour.”

The laws of unintended consequences constitute the unchanging physics of war. War is the only demonstrable perpetual motion machine as it creates the conditions necessary for its continuance:

“...war came to the Korengal when timber traders from a northern faction of the Safi tribe allied themselves with the first U.S. Special Forces that came through the area in early 2002. When the Americans tried to enter the Korengal they met resistance from local timber cutters who realized that the northern Safis were poised to take over their operation... For both sides, the battle for the Korengal developed a logic of its own that sucked in more and more resources and lives until neither side could afford to walk away.”

Frankly I am exhausted hearing the old shibboleths about war evoking the best human traits of compassion, self-sacrifice, courage, and solidarity. Junger has a familiar anecdote:

“Moreno put his hands on him and started to pull him out of the gunfire. A Third Squad team leader named Hijar ran forward to help, and he and Moreno managed to drag Guttie behind cover before anyone got hit. By that time the medic, Doc Old, had gotten to them and was kneeling in the dirt trying to figure out how badly Guttie was hurt. Later I asked Hijar whether he had felt any hesitation before running out there. ‘No,’ Hijar said, ‘he’d do that for me. Knowing that is the only thing that makes any of this possible.’”

Exactly. It is the intense caring for each other by soldiers in combat that makes the whole enterprise of war possible. The entire complex machine of the military has been geared to generate and to exploit this fundamental force of fellow-feeling among men who come largely from the margins of society and who have no clue about the process to which they’re being subjected. Indoctrination is the official term; brainwashing is the more accurate. To me this is at least as obscene as the violence that it permits. This is the open secret of all armies everywhere. It is also a source of immense guilt, regret, and psychosis among those who are its product. By distorting and intensifying the natural sympathy among men, the military creates zombies who are emotionally neither dead nor alive.

Is it too much to hope that, despite their hormonal disturbances, someday young men who are encouraged to wage war will tell the old men who insist on war to fuck off?

I found this a less appealing narrative than Junger's masterful The Perfect Storm. The stories seemed a little choppy and the order was sometimes confusing. However, it is a rare inside glimpse of what modern combat is really like. The men serving in Afghanistan crave action, feel fear and primarily suffer from crushing boredom. I'm glad I read this and generally would recommend to fans of action/adventure non-fiction.