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A review by jfl
War by Sebastian Junger
4.0
The past year, I have read half a dozen books that have woven me through the Iraq war starting in 2003 (Nathaniel Fick's "One Bullet Away"; Evan Wright's "Generation Kill"), moving forward through 2004 and 2005 (Peter Mansoor's "Baghdad at Sunrise"; Donovan Campbell's "Jocker One") and ending with David Finkel's "The Good Soldiers" (the surge in 2007). Robert Baer's "The Devil We Know" provided a glimpse of Iran. Sebastian Junger's "War" has carried me into Afghanistan starting in 2007 and ending in 2008.
The authors have either been engaged soldiers like Fick, Campbell and Mansoor or embedded journalists like Wright, Finkel and Junger.
Karl Matterhorn in his Vietnam saga, "Matterhorn," describes the soldiers: "From the skipper right on down, they all wore the same filthy tattered camouflage....All of them were too thin, too young, and too exhausted. They all talked the same, too, saying fuck, or some adjective, noun, or adverb with fuck in it, every four words." From Nathaniel Fick though Junger, the same description would seem to survive into Iraq and Afghanistan. Culturally untutored youth serving under constant life-threatening danger from other untutored youth. "The more things change the more they stay the same."
Junger's book is not as consistently effective as Finkel's work, but it is well ahead of most of the other war narratives that I've read at this point. Except for Brendan O'Byrne, Junger's soldiers are not as three dimensional as I would have expected from the author. Junger interjects himself far too frequently in the actual chronicle of the Second Platoon's time in the Korengal Valley. But he does deal convincingly with the external and internal forces that keep the young men engaged in the heat of armed conflict. And he captures the tensions of that conflict well, too, adding reconfirming tones to Campbell and Finkel. In that respect, his soldiers echo those in the movie, "The Hurt Locker" with the lead soldiers re-enlisting, narcoticly, for another tour or the earlier "Black Hawk Down" that dramatized the cohesiveness--the love, as Junger's third chapter is entitled-- of the soldiers one for the other.
The authors have either been engaged soldiers like Fick, Campbell and Mansoor or embedded journalists like Wright, Finkel and Junger.
Karl Matterhorn in his Vietnam saga, "Matterhorn," describes the soldiers: "From the skipper right on down, they all wore the same filthy tattered camouflage....All of them were too thin, too young, and too exhausted. They all talked the same, too, saying fuck, or some adjective, noun, or adverb with fuck in it, every four words." From Nathaniel Fick though Junger, the same description would seem to survive into Iraq and Afghanistan. Culturally untutored youth serving under constant life-threatening danger from other untutored youth. "The more things change the more they stay the same."
Junger's book is not as consistently effective as Finkel's work, but it is well ahead of most of the other war narratives that I've read at this point. Except for Brendan O'Byrne, Junger's soldiers are not as three dimensional as I would have expected from the author. Junger interjects himself far too frequently in the actual chronicle of the Second Platoon's time in the Korengal Valley. But he does deal convincingly with the external and internal forces that keep the young men engaged in the heat of armed conflict. And he captures the tensions of that conflict well, too, adding reconfirming tones to Campbell and Finkel. In that respect, his soldiers echo those in the movie, "The Hurt Locker" with the lead soldiers re-enlisting, narcoticly, for another tour or the earlier "Black Hawk Down" that dramatized the cohesiveness--the love, as Junger's third chapter is entitled-- of the soldiers one for the other.