There are a lot of valid critiques of portraying war in this manner, but ultimately it is good for me to remember that the psyches of men (insert obvious caveats here) crave the camaraderie and adrenaline of combat, and that our society does not offer that elsewhere. Parts of this book were horrifying to read: not the descriptions of combat or death or killing or fear, but the emotional responses of soldiers thereto. For example, parsing the joy of killing into not joy at death, but joy at perhaps preventing one’s own (or one’s brother’s) death. Craving combat to relieve boredom. Fearing, perhaps dreading or avoiding, the return to civilian life, because it means losing the deep meaning and purpose and brotherhood that is integral to combat.

The separation Junger maintains from the horrors of killing (e.g.: there’s no moral judgement made in the book about dropping a bomb on a civilian house and killing a dozen Afghan civilians, in fact it leans toward the “well, they were allowing the Taliban to enter their village”) is unsettling and, as I see it, the biggest critique of this book. But… I don’t think it was necessary to include because this book wasn’t about Afghanistan or war itself. It was about connection and brotherhood and base human needs — the Korangal Valley is simply where those needs are laid bare and those connections are most critical. Ultimately, war is complex; it is important to read this book as one piece of that complexity, rather than as a simplification denying that complexity.