Junger, a journalist and filmmaker, embedded with an American platoon for a 15-month tour of duty in Afghanistan. His subjects became friends. Many of them died. He almost died.

In the process, he wrote a minor masterpiece on a few different topics: How it feels to be surrounded by death, how it feels to be surrounded by people who would die for you, and how bonds develop as a result of both conditions.

There have been better books written about earlier wars, and there may be better books written about the early-21st-century American wars, but I’d find it hard to believe that many better books were written this close to the action. There’s something about being shot at regularly that leaves a mark on a writer’s prose, and Sebastian Junger puts that je ne sais quoi on almost every page.

I love books that are packed with real conversations and weird little details about things that don’t matter in a big-picture sense, and War is exactly that. Junger is perfectly willing to spend a couple of pages discussing which soldiers resemble which household appliances, or an incident where the Army accidentally barbecued someone’s cow — but on any page, at any moment, combat might start up again. In that sense, reading the book feels a little bit like war is supposed to feel. War attempts to get us closer to the mental state of the people we’ve asked to live inside that feeling.

(While the book isn’t political, or “solutions-oriented”, Junger never loses sight of the fact that much of what we did in Afghanistan was stupid and terrible. The plans of our enemies were also stupid and terrible. Sometimes, there aren’t any good solutions.)