War [Anglais] [Relié]

Sebastian Junger is the well-known author of The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont. He is also a world-class war correspondent with over a decade of experience. This book is the product of five months spent embedded with a platoon in U.S. 2nd Battalion in the Korengal valley, Afghanistan. For five months, Junger existed like a regular soldier in the U.S. army: He ate MREs, went on patrol, took cover when the bullets started to fly. As Junger likes to explain in the book, he was the target of the same bullets as the other men in the platoon, and he had the same responsibility to Army rules. Even one broken minor rule risked lives. Junger remained vigilant, won the companionship of these soldiers, and garnered enough of their trust to record their thoughts and beliefs about what it's like to be in combat. That's what this book is about. The war in Afghanistan happened to be just a convenient location to do field research. At one particular scary moment, Junger was in a Hummer that got hit by a roadside bomb. The bomb exploded under the engine block, ten feet away. The blast shook Junger's emotions for days. Needless to say, this book was almost never written.

Good thing it was. Junger provides excellent war correspondence, describing combat as a first-hand observer. Junger's prose remains apolitical, his goal to show the reader what it's like to be in battle, not make a political statement. The book is broken into three sections: "Fear," "Killing," and "Love." All three sections describe combat, but each section is loosely structured around its theme. In "Fear," Junger loosely analyzes why or why not soldiers might be afraid to fight; in "Killing" we learn why soldiers kill, how they feel about ending the life of an enemy combatant, and how they feel when one of their own receives that fate; in "Love," Junger makes an attempt to learn why soldiers would die in combat for their comrades. In fact, this section talks about bravery probably more than the first section. In one particularly long chapter, through interviews with soldiers and references to Army studies, Junger tries to figure out why one young man barely out of his teens (yes, let's not forget that these men are practically still boys) would jump on a live hand grenade. Junger's prose reads like amazing stuff.

I suspect that this book will receive mostly positive reviews, mainly for its reporting. Certainly it deserves it. But the book is not without its faults, and I'd like to point out a few. The faults are mostly literary and organizational, however, and none hampered my reading pleasure. If you're a normal guy who just wants to read about fighting, or if you loved A Perfect Storm and just want another good read, then you'll probably not notice or care about these little problems. Without reservation, buy this book. If you're more literary minded, then maybe you'll prefer to read more this review.

Embedded with Junger was a photojournalist named Tim Hetherington. Between them they shot over 150 hours of video, which was made into a recently released documentary called "Restrepo." (This name comes from the name of a fallen American soldier and the name of an important military outpost in the Korengal valley where Second Platoon spent a lot of their time.) Some (not all) of the combat scenes in the book read like he was watching video, and describing what he saw. This is not bad, but the strength of prose over video is that a writer can slow down time and stretch emotionally charged moments into pages. The writer can dig deep into the thoughts of his characters or himself, set up suspense, tackle fear, do whatever it takes. The best parts of the book are when Junger writes about his emotions and other fighters' emotions, when he writes philosophical about combat, and how he and the soldiers cope with the combat (conveniently recounted a few pages earlier). Much of the philosophy and memoir-style introspection jumps back and forth with combat scenes. Rarely do I recommend that a book be 50 to 100 pages longer, but I wish this book was. I wish that Junger combined his introspective musings and thought provoking observations, while he was describing the action. This type of writing style would have slowed down some of his action scenes and made his writing perfect. As it is, it's pretty good already.

The one other minor complaint I had about the book was organizational. Chapter One describes a very specific start date for Junger's embedment (Spring 2007), but then in subsequent chapters I got a little confused about the chronology. Besides a few references to the heat or snow, it was difficult to get a feel for the exact chronology. Not that it matters too much -- this book is about fighting, and to the men stuck at outpost Restrepo, in the mountains of Afghanistan, far away from home, both physically and emotionally, it doesn't really matter what part of the year it is. Maybe Junger was trying to convey this.

The book has an extensive bibliography that includes up-to-date literature on killing and combat. Junger spends some time philosophizing about fighting, killing, and cognitive processes during battle, and he backs up his writing with multiple studies. PTSD and other "mental casualties" are acknowledged, as well.

Not only does WAR try to describe what it's like to be in combat, but it makes a serious attempt to try and figure out why men actually enjoy it. (Yes, believe it or not, my feeling by the end of the book was that these men do.) Towards the end of the book, Junger provides a neurological explanation: "The dopamine reward system exists in both sexes but is stronger in men, and as a result, men are far more likely to become obsessively involved in such things as hunting, gambling, computer games, and war. When the men of Second Platoon were moping around the outpost hoping for a firefight it was because, among other things, they weren't getting their accustomed dose of endorphins and dopamine." Then there is the sociological perspective. The men profiled in this book did not necessariily join the Army to die for thie country (although some do). Above all, it's the strong personal bonds, almost love, between young men who have been through challenging training and hardship, drive much of what takes place in war -- courage, bravery, willingness to die -- it all comes down to personal bonds. Men will die for their friends.

There aren't many books that really tell the reader what it means to be in battle. Those that have been there don't feel comfortable trying to explain it to those that haven't. As more than one combat veteran has told me, "you just wouldn't understand." Most reporters, even those embedded in a war, haven't really experienced what it means to bean active participant in battle- trying to kill someone before he kills you. There are some very good books about what it's like to be in the middle of a war, like Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place; Fall was a French reporter who was there at the siege of Dien Bien Phu. But even though Fall could describe what it felt like to survive the incessant shelling and attack on the base, he wasn't a combatant. He was still a reporter, an observer.

Sebastian Junger is a writer of rare skill who can paint a frighteningly real picture of places few of us would ever think of going. His first book, The Perfect Storm, gave readers a taste of what it would be like to be on a doomed fishing boat in the North Atlantic, at from home, at the mercy of the sea. In War, he takes the reader to an Army outpost in Afghanistan, where Junger and filmmaker Tim Hetherington spent five months over the course of a year and a half with a platoon of young soldiers, fighting a war that we've all read about, but that few of us can imagine.

This isn't the tourist war reporting we're used to, where the embedded reporter rides along at the rear of an armored column; Junger puts himself in a situation where he runs all the risks of the soldiers he's reporting on, including getting blown up by an IED that is detonated under the Humvee he's riding in. He manages to survive only because the Taliban soldier triggering the bomb pushed the button a fraction of a second too soon, and the blast is absorbed by the engine rather than the men riding in the Humvee. We're with Junger- and the soldiers of the platoon- as they go on a night time patrol, walk into an ambush, and fight off an assault that nearly overruns their little camp.

Junger does not moralize on the war itself; as he explains, to do so would distance him from the men he's writing about, who aren't terribly concerned with politics or the geopolitics of the war. They're concerned with only one thing- survival- which means killing the man out there before he kills you. Isolated in mountainous terrain, with air support a good hour away, the men of Second Platoon, Battle Company, have to rely entirely on one another. Each man knows that every other man in his platoon will (and often do) die for him- otherwise there's no way they could survive where they are. War is full of stories of what seem like astounding heroism in the face of deadly fire- but what are to then men of the platoon, simply what they do. As one solider puts it, going out there to this lonely outpost is what takes bravery; everything after that is just doing your job.

Junger goes into some detail asking the question of why men willingly go into battle and sacrifice their lives for each other, quoting studies from WWII through the Gulf War. There's a good deal of interesting data and hypothesis, such as the curious fact that the largest sustainable hunter-gatherer community is about the size of a platoon- anything larger, and things like self-sacrifice and acting for the good of the community appear to break down. Or that chimpanzees, with whom we share 99% of our DNA, don't exhibit the same kind of self-sacrifice we see in humans. When neighboring groups attack a smaller, weaker group, they don't band together for aid- instead, those who can run away, leaving the slower and weaker chimps at the mercy of the invaders. Self-sacrifice in battle is a uniquely human behavior.

What it comes down to in the end is that soldiers do it out of love for their fellow soldier. As one remarks to Junger, who asked why he says he'd throw himself on a grenade to protect his squad, "Because I actually love my brothers... Being able to save their lives so that they can live is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me."

This is a pretty good book - certainly eye-opening - but didn't quite match up to my read of "The Good Soldiers" last year (by David Finkel).

That War's author, Sebastian Junger, chose to spend 5 months in the fiercest combat in Afganistan is very impressive and deserves a lot of credit. He also included exhaustive footnotes supporting research he cites. What comes through well is the violence the men faced every day, the extreme living conditions, the losses taken and imposed on the enemy, the brotherhood formed within the platoon. He is admirably apolitical (as are his subjects) even as he honors the soldiers he lived with.

What didn't come through to me was a personal connection to any of the soldiers. The book felt disorganized, like a lot of unrelated scenes strung together, making it tough to follow the action or see how soldiers changed or grew over time.

Also, a photographer was embedded with Junger almost the whole time, but there are only three photos in the book (all on the jacket). A few more images and a map or two of the area would have been a huge help to the reader in visualizing the soldiers, the geography, and the firefights. (The documentary film of the book just came out, called "Restrepo." I'm eager to see it, but would have been nice to have a few pics in the book to whet the appetite.)

In all, War is good, but if you're going to read just one of these two books about modern-day US soldiers' experience in combat, I'd recommend The Good Soldiers. It is set in Iraq instead of Afganistan, but the timing and issues are similar. And you get to know the soldiers personally - including the gut-wrenching feeling when one of them is killed or injured.