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War
They were known as "The Rock." For one year, in 2007-2008, Sebastian Junger accompanied a single platoon of thirty men from the storied 2nd battalion of the U.S. Army, as they fought their way through a remote valley in Eastern Afghanistan. Over the course of five trips, Junger was in more firefights than he can count, men he knew were killed or wounded, and he himself was almost killed. His relationship with these soldiers grew so close that they considered him part of the platoon, and he enjoyed an access and a candidness that few, if any, journalists ever attain. WAR is a narrative about combat: the fear of dying, the trauma of killing and the love between platoon-mates who would rather die than let each other down. Gripping, honest, intense, WAR explores the neurological, psychological and social elements of combat, and the incredible bonds that form between these small groups of men. This is not a book about Afghanistan or the 'War on Terror' it is a book about the universal truth of all men, in all wars. Junger set out to answer what he thought of as the 'hand grenade question': why would a man throw himself on a hand grenade to save other men he has probably known for only a few months? The answer is elusive but profound, and goes to the heart of what it means not just to be a soldier, but to be human.
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First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Sebastian Junger
41 books2,697 followersSebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of War, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and A Death in Belmont. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the Academy Award-nominated film Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He lives in New York City.
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November 23, 2023
I listened to a podcast hosted by a former operator. He said something that stuck with me - if you touch war, it touches you back. It's such a profound, heavy sentence.
This book has been on my radar since I watched Restrepo, a war documentary directed by photojournalist Tim Hetherington and journalist Sebastian Junger. I also watched The Perfect Storm, a biographical disaster drama film based on a novel of the same name by Sebastian Junger. I finally did it. I finally read one of Mr. Junger's books.
Wars have been waged since the beginning of time. Humans are strange creatures. We can't live in peace. It's a sad thing to say, but it's true. There hasn't been a moment of peace in the entire course of human history. There's always conflict in the world. One group of people is trying to oppress the other. And so it goes, rinse and repeat. It's the 21st century, and we still haven't gotten our shit together.
All the men in my family served in the military. I know war. War has had many shapes and many faces. Ancient Greeks had Athena and Ares. Ancient Scandinavians had Týr and Freyja. The Celts had Mórrigan, Badb, Macha, and Neit. Ancient Egyptians had Montu and Sekhmet. The current reincarnation of war wears a fancy suit and sits in a luxurious, well-protected office. He is a dictator. He is a president. He is a premier. He is a greedy politician. He has many names and many faces.
Sebastian Junger has reported from war zones in Liberia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. He spent several months with Battle Company (part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade) in the Korengal Valley, an extremely violent slit in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
The book starts with a, for lack of a better word, bang. A wounded soldier sits in a darkened room and reminisces about the Bella Ambush. Fourteen American Chosen Company soldiers, twelve Afghan soldiers, a Marine, and an Afghan interpreter walked into an ambush as they were leaving a meeting with the elders in the nearby village of Aranas. Six Americans and eight Afghans lost their lives, and the rest were heavily wounded.
Justin is not doing so well. Neither is O'Byrne. From the moment he appeared, I could immediately tell he had severe PTSD. I knew before he uttered a single word. I contemplated quitting the book. I made it through the prologue with a sigh. There was no graphic imagery, just a weird feeling of discomfort. I persevered.
The first chapter describes the Battle Company's arrival at the Korengal Outpost. Battle Company arrived in Korengal Valley in May 2007. 'The Valley of Death' welcomed them with mortars and bullets. They ate one hot meal a day and showered once a week. They were constantly under fire. It's what they signed up for – 15 months of danger, ugliness, and dirtiness.
Korengal Valley was starting to acquire a reputation as a place that could alter your mind in terrible and irreversible ways. The first night at the KOP, O’Byrne heard a strange yammering in the forest and assumed the base was about to get attacked. He grabbed his gun and waited. Nothing happened. Later he found out it was just monkeys that came down to the wire to shriek at the Americans. It was as if every living thing in the valley, even the wildlife, wanted them gone.
Sebastian Junger described the Korengal Valley as too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, and too autonomous to buy off. The Soviets tried to conquer it but failed miserably. Even the Taliban were afraid of it. Korengal Valley reminds me of Tolkien's Ered Nimrais (if you know, you know).
Sebastian and Tim spent months in Korengal documenting the daily lives of soldiers from the Battle Company. The isolated outpost was renamed 'Restrepo' in honor of their fallen platoon medic, Juan Restrepo. There was no sugar-coating. No hollywoodization. No romantization.
The men were neither particularly heroic nor particularly kind. I appreciated the lack of sappiness. I wasn't looking for another Saving Private Ryan. I wanted a realistic depiction of war and its effect on the human psyche.
If you touch war, the war will touch you back. War isn't pretty. It's not kind. It's not romantic. Hollywood tends to romanticize war. Anyone who has seen American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lone Survivor (which contains many inaccuracies) knows what I mean. Most people don't want the gritty reality. They want to watch sexy, patriotic Navy Seals do badass, sexy, patriotic stuff. Who cares if they commit a few war crimes along the way (looking at you, Chris K. and Eddie G.) Hollywood doesn't make movies that show the true vileness and pointlessness of war. The only ones that have come close, for me, have been Black Hawk Down, The Thin Red Line, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
If you think the politicians and the military care about soldiers, go outside and touch some grass. Soldiers are expendable. It doesn't matter whether it's an infantryman or a highly trained operator, a private or an officer. No one is irreplaceable. Corruption reigns supreme. Politicians collect votes and money. Generals and admirals collect pins, stripes, and money. Soldiers collect scars and PTSD. That's how it is in Europe. I'm sure North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia are no different.
“The Army’s trying to kill me,” he says. “I don’t dare come back. They’re trying to kill me.”
This book has been on my radar since I watched Restrepo, a war documentary directed by photojournalist Tim Hetherington and journalist Sebastian Junger. I also watched The Perfect Storm, a biographical disaster drama film based on a novel of the same name by Sebastian Junger. I finally did it. I finally read one of Mr. Junger's books.
Wars have been waged since the beginning of time. Humans are strange creatures. We can't live in peace. It's a sad thing to say, but it's true. There hasn't been a moment of peace in the entire course of human history. There's always conflict in the world. One group of people is trying to oppress the other. And so it goes, rinse and repeat. It's the 21st century, and we still haven't gotten our shit together.
All the men in my family served in the military. I know war. War has had many shapes and many faces. Ancient Greeks had Athena and Ares. Ancient Scandinavians had Týr and Freyja. The Celts had Mórrigan, Badb, Macha, and Neit. Ancient Egyptians had Montu and Sekhmet. The current reincarnation of war wears a fancy suit and sits in a luxurious, well-protected office. He is a dictator. He is a president. He is a premier. He is a greedy politician. He has many names and many faces.
Sebastian Junger has reported from war zones in Liberia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. He spent several months with Battle Company (part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade) in the Korengal Valley, an extremely violent slit in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
The book starts with a, for lack of a better word, bang. A wounded soldier sits in a darkened room and reminisces about the Bella Ambush. Fourteen American Chosen Company soldiers, twelve Afghan soldiers, a Marine, and an Afghan interpreter walked into an ambush as they were leaving a meeting with the elders in the nearby village of Aranas. Six Americans and eight Afghans lost their lives, and the rest were heavily wounded.
Justin is not doing so well. Neither is O'Byrne. From the moment he appeared, I could immediately tell he had severe PTSD. I knew before he uttered a single word. I contemplated quitting the book. I made it through the prologue with a sigh. There was no graphic imagery, just a weird feeling of discomfort. I persevered.
The first chapter describes the Battle Company's arrival at the Korengal Outpost. Battle Company arrived in Korengal Valley in May 2007. 'The Valley of Death' welcomed them with mortars and bullets. They ate one hot meal a day and showered once a week. They were constantly under fire. It's what they signed up for – 15 months of danger, ugliness, and dirtiness.
Korengal Valley was starting to acquire a reputation as a place that could alter your mind in terrible and irreversible ways. The first night at the KOP, O’Byrne heard a strange yammering in the forest and assumed the base was about to get attacked. He grabbed his gun and waited. Nothing happened. Later he found out it was just monkeys that came down to the wire to shriek at the Americans. It was as if every living thing in the valley, even the wildlife, wanted them gone.
Sebastian Junger described the Korengal Valley as too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, and too autonomous to buy off. The Soviets tried to conquer it but failed miserably. Even the Taliban were afraid of it. Korengal Valley reminds me of Tolkien's Ered Nimrais (if you know, you know).
Sebastian and Tim spent months in Korengal documenting the daily lives of soldiers from the Battle Company. The isolated outpost was renamed 'Restrepo' in honor of their fallen platoon medic, Juan Restrepo. There was no sugar-coating. No hollywoodization. No romantization.
The men were neither particularly heroic nor particularly kind. I appreciated the lack of sappiness. I wasn't looking for another Saving Private Ryan. I wanted a realistic depiction of war and its effect on the human psyche.
If you touch war, the war will touch you back. War isn't pretty. It's not kind. It's not romantic. Hollywood tends to romanticize war. Anyone who has seen American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lone Survivor (which contains many inaccuracies) knows what I mean. Most people don't want the gritty reality. They want to watch sexy, patriotic Navy Seals do badass, sexy, patriotic stuff. Who cares if they commit a few war crimes along the way (looking at you, Chris K. and Eddie G.) Hollywood doesn't make movies that show the true vileness and pointlessness of war. The only ones that have come close, for me, have been Black Hawk Down, The Thin Red Line, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
If you think the politicians and the military care about soldiers, go outside and touch some grass. Soldiers are expendable. It doesn't matter whether it's an infantryman or a highly trained operator, a private or an officer. No one is irreplaceable. Corruption reigns supreme. Politicians collect votes and money. Generals and admirals collect pins, stripes, and money. Soldiers collect scars and PTSD. That's how it is in Europe. I'm sure North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia are no different.
“The Army’s trying to kill me,” he says. “I don’t dare come back. They’re trying to kill me.”
August 26, 2021
Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win.The story here has nothing to do with politics, macro foreign policy, or terrorism, per se. Junger looks at the experience of a small band of soldiers at the front lines of the war in Afghanistan, in the eastern reaches, in a valley notorious for its peril to combatants. What matters here are the mechanisms, physical and emotional, that bind the soldiers to one another. What they consider funny, what topics are off limits, how they rely on each other, criticize each other, support each other, how they cope with or thrive on the reality of war.
The choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is a choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.
Sebastian Junger - image from Popmatters.com
This book is as much a look at war through the lenses of psychology and anthropology as it is a portrait of front-line combat. A quick look at the Sources and References, rich with articles from publications like Neurocardiology Letters, American Psychological Association Monitor, Gerontologist, Proceedings of this and that, shows that there is far more going in War than adrenaline, blood, and bullets. Not only does Junger examine the significance of group interactions among company members, but looks to what the roots of this construction might be in the development of homo sapiens as a species. He looks at how group cohesion and situational preparation affect fear, and how, for some, war is less a horror to be avoided and forgotten than the pinnacle of one’s existence.
A scene from the film Restrepo
The book is divided into three sections, Fear, Killing, and Love. The first is predominantly a familiar sort of war reportage, well done, but nothing new. The latter sections look beyond the obvious and get into some very interesting material. War is a very smart book that will take you places you might not expect to go. It is well worth the journey.
In 2010, the book was made into an outstanding documentary film, Restrepo
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages
November 23, 2016
Stupendously brilliant and enlightening book. I understand the appeal of war much more now. It's nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with an uber-boy's club, guns and adrenaline. I understand men a lot more now too. This book should be required reading for the parents and girlfriends of the young men who have enlisted in the military.
It isn't what anyone would actually want to hear - no one much cares about the political reasons for prosecuting the war, everyone likes firing guns at the enemy. It's like watching half a dozen nine year old boys with cap guns dodging around trees, throwing themselves on the ground, pretending to be dead, not capturing anyone, just shooting, and kids shouting out 'no fair' and getting shot anyway (here, all the other boys laugh). Its just like that, only ten years later and with real ammunition.
War will never end when it provides thrills like that.
It isn't what anyone would actually want to hear - no one much cares about the political reasons for prosecuting the war, everyone likes firing guns at the enemy. It's like watching half a dozen nine year old boys with cap guns dodging around trees, throwing themselves on the ground, pretending to be dead, not capturing anyone, just shooting, and kids shouting out 'no fair' and getting shot anyway (here, all the other boys laugh). Its just like that, only ten years later and with real ammunition.
War will never end when it provides thrills like that.
October 1, 2021
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:
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:
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?
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?
June 14, 2014
One word - WAR and that doleful eye glaring out at you. Powerful cover, so’s the book. Picked it because it promised to get me inside the head of a soldier. An honest, no holds barred account of the day-to-day lives of soldiers serving in the intensely hot military zone of Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Riveted from page one my mouth was actually hanging open reading this - seriously. It’s gritty and raw; it’s also pretty funny at times; these guys have a truly twisted appreciation of the absurd.
Expected and it delivered stories of brutality, praise for the toughness & bravery of soldiers – didn’t expect “War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting.”
This book is SOAKED in testosterone, a bunch of cowboys on some kind of crazed adrenaline rush; half the time in abject misery, the other having literally a blast with guns.
He covers it all, the atrocious living conditions “Summer grinds on: a hundred degrees every day and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat” the terrain “too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate” the mechanics of warfare, “the choreography of combat” - but it shone talking about the men…
Jones: “He roamed Restrepo like some kind of alpha predator, exuded a strange, sullen anger that never quite came to the surface. He was fond of giving someone a dismissive look and saying, “Just a mess. A soup sandwich.”
Patterson: Just 30, the men call him Pops. “ I never saw him look even nervous during a fight, much less scared. He commanded his men like he was directing traffic.”
O’Bryne: What a screw up, I liked him immensely. “He wasn’t big but it was like he was made out of scrap metal.”
Maybe take it with a grain of salt…I’ve been pondering this book for a couple of weeks, still am. There’s an awful lot of chest thumping going on – that “I’m good” bit men put out even when they’re ripping apart inside. Maybe Junger just bought into there whole macho act hook, line & sinker. Can't blame him, they’ve honed it to perfection. Still, convinced it's gotta be deeper than this. Junger’s a civilian and a journalist to boot. Wouldn’t he be the last guy they’d pick to spew there guts to?
Meanderings: I’m clueless about war so pay no attention, the only soldier I’ve ever known was my dad, a WW2 Vet. Proud of having served he returned a bitter, changed man. Refused to talk about the war to anyone, period - not even Mom. Interesting that he welcomed Vietnam draft-dodgers into our home, I’d love to know what, if anything, he had to say to them.
So I’m taking this at face value – Junger’s fabulous spin on what makes a soldier tick… 4 ½ stars
Expected and it delivered stories of brutality, praise for the toughness & bravery of soldiers – didn’t expect “War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting.”
This book is SOAKED in testosterone, a bunch of cowboys on some kind of crazed adrenaline rush; half the time in abject misery, the other having literally a blast with guns.
He covers it all, the atrocious living conditions “Summer grinds on: a hundred degrees every day and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat” the terrain “too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate” the mechanics of warfare, “the choreography of combat” - but it shone talking about the men…
Jones: “He roamed Restrepo like some kind of alpha predator, exuded a strange, sullen anger that never quite came to the surface. He was fond of giving someone a dismissive look and saying, “Just a mess. A soup sandwich.”
Patterson: Just 30, the men call him Pops. “ I never saw him look even nervous during a fight, much less scared. He commanded his men like he was directing traffic.”
O’Bryne: What a screw up, I liked him immensely. “He wasn’t big but it was like he was made out of scrap metal.”
Maybe take it with a grain of salt…I’ve been pondering this book for a couple of weeks, still am. There’s an awful lot of chest thumping going on – that “I’m good” bit men put out even when they’re ripping apart inside. Maybe Junger just bought into there whole macho act hook, line & sinker. Can't blame him, they’ve honed it to perfection. Still, convinced it's gotta be deeper than this. Junger’s a civilian and a journalist to boot. Wouldn’t he be the last guy they’d pick to spew there guts to?
Meanderings: I’m clueless about war so pay no attention, the only soldier I’ve ever known was my dad, a WW2 Vet. Proud of having served he returned a bitter, changed man. Refused to talk about the war to anyone, period - not even Mom. Interesting that he welcomed Vietnam draft-dodgers into our home, I’d love to know what, if anything, he had to say to them.
So I’m taking this at face value – Junger’s fabulous spin on what makes a soldier tick… 4 ½ stars
June 8, 2014
This book was a gripping and moving read for me. Junger renders an account of the experience a platoon stationed at a remote outpost in northern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. He calls it “the tip of the spear” in the war effort because the units stationed in this mountain valley, the Korengal, saw more continuous fighting than elsewhere in the war. Junger was physically embedded with these men for five one-month periods between 2007 and 2008, and he was clearly emotionally embedded too. This was a dangerous work, as he was exposed to near misses from rifle shots and mortar rounds at camp and on aggressive patrols and was subject to an IED attack of his vehicle on a convoy run. The experience allowed him to capture significant insights on the ability of soldiers in combat to harness the “band of brothers” mentality and surmount fears and work effectively as a team in the face of intense dangers.
Firebase Restopo. Named after a beloved medic who died, the base served to prevent use of the valley for staging attacks on the nearby the Pech River Valley, where a larger effort was devoted to efforts of preventing Taliban insurgents and arms from entering the country.
This slice of life of one platoon of 20 in the Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team reveals a lot about war in general and the special features on this particular war. The difficult terrain and logistical challenges of this area contributed to the inability of Alexander, the British, and Soviets to subdue the region. All the advanced technology the Americans could put at play here, Apache helicopter gunships, Stealth bombers, advanced artillery, and unmanned drones, could not dispel the need for soldiers in place to intercede with the passage of Taliban forces from Pakistan and to work to win over the hearts and minds of local Pashtun populations needed to support them. As American citizens who put these young men in harm’s way, we owe it to them to honor their sacrifice and learn more about their efforts. This book, as well as the documentary “Restopo” and recently released “Korengal” that Junger produced with Tim Hetherington, are monumental achievements in fulfilling that need:
Combat was a game that the United States had asked Second Platoon to become very good at, and once they had, the United States had put them on a hilltop without women, hot food, running water, communication with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. . In a every crude sense the job of young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile long valley in Kunar Province needs to be brought under military control.…Nearly fifty American soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I’m not saying that’s a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged. Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.
Junger strives hard to be objective, but he can’t help identifying with the soldiers. He earned their respect and was paid with honesty. He found they all wanted to be there. He was subject to no censorship in any way. He makes a point of the difference from the situation with the Vietnam War:
Vietnam was considered a morally dubious war that was fought by draftees while the rest of the nation was dropping acid and listening to Jimi Hendrix. Afghanistan, on the other hand, was being fought by volunteers who more or less respected their commanders and had the gratitude of the vast majority of Americans back home. If you imagined that your job, as a reporter, was to buddy up to the troops and tell the “real” story of how they were dying in a senseless war, you were in for a surprise. The commanders would realize would realize you were operating off a particular kind of cultural programming and would try to change your mind, but the men wouldn’t bother. They’d just refuse to talk to you until you left their base.
Junger takes pains to explain how ideology or motivation for manly glory plays no part in accounting for why the men here achieved what is judged as courage. What Junger witnessed, backed up by historical studies, confirms that debilitating fear happens less when the soldier has a sense of active control or choice in his fate, even when objectively the danger is high. Conversely, the random risk associated with roadway IEDs defeat these advantages, and all one’s skills mean nothing. Love for his fellow soldier is the most potent factor in his view to account for why so many are willing to risk their own safety and lives to come to the aid of another in trouble. What he saw and what he shares from research reveals how most PTSD outcomes arise from the experience of the injury or death of a platoon mate rather than threats or injury to himself.
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens wit time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes the person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing.
Junger’s reporting makes these capabilities to act in ways contrary to drives for individual survival come powerfully alive. In interludes, he explains well the history of these ideas. He also pauses in the high-octane narrative to provide useful summaries on human physiology of soldiers in combat. From training and personality, some excel in this business of killing and avoiding being killed. Junger identifies the scope of the addictive jolt and secret pleasures many soldiers experience in this work. There is some sense of potency in the rush of success at riding the wave on the cusp of death and surviving:
War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t were you might die—though that does happen—it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living.
These guys are the ones who have trouble accommodating to the mundane concerns civilian life, where success takes more cumbersome efforts. They are the ones who re-enlist for a job they know they can do well, achieve a special sense of belonging, and reap the thrills of effective action. Junger looks at the details of the brave and resourceful actions of Staff Sergeant Giunta who was awarded a Medal of Honor in 2010. Under a well executed enemy ambush that split his platoon and killed two, Giunta raced into a hail of bullets to retrieve an injured man and coordinated a critical reuniting of their forces. As President Obama notes at the award ceremony, Giunta echoes Audie Murphy from World War 2 in stating that he didn’t do anything special and that he was just doing his job to assure that fallen comrade was not left behind. To probe deeper for the how and why of this capacity, Junger constantly walks the boundaries between seeing the affinity of some men for combat in pathological terms such as addiction and accounting for it as something tied in with core characteristics in human nature.
Collective defense can be so compelling—so addictive, in fact—that eventually it becomes the rationale for why the group exists in the first place. I think almost every man at Restopo secretly hoped the enemy would make a serious try at overrunning the place before the deployment came to an end. It was everyone’s worst nightmare but also the thing they hoped for most, some ultimate demonstration of the bond and fighting ability of the men.
He would have done better to leave it there. It is fair to speculate a bit on linkages to the natural systems of reward in the brain, but his trying to explain the motivations for combat to dopamine systems is a circular explanation that adds nothing to understanding in my view. And to point toward a likely evolutionary basis in brain wiring for collective defense to the point of suicidal action went too far in leaving the impression there is consensus on war and humans as killer apes in being biologically determined. There is plenty of innovative achievement in this book in its elucidation of men in combat without reaching for dubious “ultimate” explanations.
Sebastian Junger
Firebase Restopo. Named after a beloved medic who died, the base served to prevent use of the valley for staging attacks on the nearby the Pech River Valley, where a larger effort was devoted to efforts of preventing Taliban insurgents and arms from entering the country.
This slice of life of one platoon of 20 in the Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team reveals a lot about war in general and the special features on this particular war. The difficult terrain and logistical challenges of this area contributed to the inability of Alexander, the British, and Soviets to subdue the region. All the advanced technology the Americans could put at play here, Apache helicopter gunships, Stealth bombers, advanced artillery, and unmanned drones, could not dispel the need for soldiers in place to intercede with the passage of Taliban forces from Pakistan and to work to win over the hearts and minds of local Pashtun populations needed to support them. As American citizens who put these young men in harm’s way, we owe it to them to honor their sacrifice and learn more about their efforts. This book, as well as the documentary “Restopo” and recently released “Korengal” that Junger produced with Tim Hetherington, are monumental achievements in fulfilling that need:
Combat was a game that the United States had asked Second Platoon to become very good at, and once they had, the United States had put them on a hilltop without women, hot food, running water, communication with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. . In a every crude sense the job of young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile long valley in Kunar Province needs to be brought under military control.…Nearly fifty American soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I’m not saying that’s a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged. Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.
Junger strives hard to be objective, but he can’t help identifying with the soldiers. He earned their respect and was paid with honesty. He found they all wanted to be there. He was subject to no censorship in any way. He makes a point of the difference from the situation with the Vietnam War:
Vietnam was considered a morally dubious war that was fought by draftees while the rest of the nation was dropping acid and listening to Jimi Hendrix. Afghanistan, on the other hand, was being fought by volunteers who more or less respected their commanders and had the gratitude of the vast majority of Americans back home. If you imagined that your job, as a reporter, was to buddy up to the troops and tell the “real” story of how they were dying in a senseless war, you were in for a surprise. The commanders would realize would realize you were operating off a particular kind of cultural programming and would try to change your mind, but the men wouldn’t bother. They’d just refuse to talk to you until you left their base.
Junger takes pains to explain how ideology or motivation for manly glory plays no part in accounting for why the men here achieved what is judged as courage. What Junger witnessed, backed up by historical studies, confirms that debilitating fear happens less when the soldier has a sense of active control or choice in his fate, even when objectively the danger is high. Conversely, the random risk associated with roadway IEDs defeat these advantages, and all one’s skills mean nothing. Love for his fellow soldier is the most potent factor in his view to account for why so many are willing to risk their own safety and lives to come to the aid of another in trouble. What he saw and what he shares from research reveals how most PTSD outcomes arise from the experience of the injury or death of a platoon mate rather than threats or injury to himself.
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens wit time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes the person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing.
Junger’s reporting makes these capabilities to act in ways contrary to drives for individual survival come powerfully alive. In interludes, he explains well the history of these ideas. He also pauses in the high-octane narrative to provide useful summaries on human physiology of soldiers in combat. From training and personality, some excel in this business of killing and avoiding being killed. Junger identifies the scope of the addictive jolt and secret pleasures many soldiers experience in this work. There is some sense of potency in the rush of success at riding the wave on the cusp of death and surviving:
War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t were you might die—though that does happen—it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living.
These guys are the ones who have trouble accommodating to the mundane concerns civilian life, where success takes more cumbersome efforts. They are the ones who re-enlist for a job they know they can do well, achieve a special sense of belonging, and reap the thrills of effective action. Junger looks at the details of the brave and resourceful actions of Staff Sergeant Giunta who was awarded a Medal of Honor in 2010. Under a well executed enemy ambush that split his platoon and killed two, Giunta raced into a hail of bullets to retrieve an injured man and coordinated a critical reuniting of their forces. As President Obama notes at the award ceremony, Giunta echoes Audie Murphy from World War 2 in stating that he didn’t do anything special and that he was just doing his job to assure that fallen comrade was not left behind. To probe deeper for the how and why of this capacity, Junger constantly walks the boundaries between seeing the affinity of some men for combat in pathological terms such as addiction and accounting for it as something tied in with core characteristics in human nature.
Collective defense can be so compelling—so addictive, in fact—that eventually it becomes the rationale for why the group exists in the first place. I think almost every man at Restopo secretly hoped the enemy would make a serious try at overrunning the place before the deployment came to an end. It was everyone’s worst nightmare but also the thing they hoped for most, some ultimate demonstration of the bond and fighting ability of the men.
He would have done better to leave it there. It is fair to speculate a bit on linkages to the natural systems of reward in the brain, but his trying to explain the motivations for combat to dopamine systems is a circular explanation that adds nothing to understanding in my view. And to point toward a likely evolutionary basis in brain wiring for collective defense to the point of suicidal action went too far in leaving the impression there is consensus on war and humans as killer apes in being biologically determined. There is plenty of innovative achievement in this book in its elucidation of men in combat without reaching for dubious “ultimate” explanations.
Sebastian Junger
August 26, 2011
Another reviewer on here said wryly that this book taught her a lot about men. A valid reaction, but it still made me wince. It’s as if I were to say I’d learned a lot about women from, like, The Devil Wears Prada or something. You want to jump up and shout, “But we’re not all like that. Or if we are, we’re not like that all the time.”
In a way, though, War isn’t a bad advertisement for what used to be called the masculine virtues. The men profiled here are incredibly brave, thrillingly competent and, within the confines of their unit, totally accountable. In other words, they’re sort of what your dad was like before you got to know him better. Except that these guys are twenty-year-old kids, for the most part. In that respect, the book is also a pretty good advertisement for the US army, which, say what you will, still knows how to turn borderline delinquents into very fine soldiers.
Of course, there’s a big OTOH looming here. If the army straightened these young men out to some extent—many were just a drinking binge away from prison when they signed up—15 months in a combat zone, amid a tiny, inward-looking fraternity, has pretty much ruined them for anything else. Most of them are smart and self-aware enough to realize this, but helpless to do anything about it.
Maybe the scariest insight provided by War isn’t that combat is horrific—we already knew that—but that it’s dangerously seductive. Deep down, many soldiers simply love to fight. Well, “simply” is the wrong word: there’s a ton of fear and guilt mixed in, but like any twisted relationship, this one's based on a perverse attraction. As Junger puts it:
War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is different. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men…These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.
Speaking as a formerly young man, I think that's a pretty astute observation. Then again, I’ve never fired a shot in anger with anything more powerful than a squirt gun, so what do I know?
I hate to get all effete and artsy-fartsy about such a manly book, but War does have one or two aesthetic shortcomings. I came to it fresh from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is basically the K2 of literary non-fiction, so I was sometimes frustrated by Junger’s pedestrian prose, which goes hand with his journalistic matter-of-factness. There’s nothing wrong with journalism—and only a truly hardcore journalist would even consider spending a year in the shittiest shithole in all of Afghanistan—but I can’t help wondering what a Rebecca West or, better yet, a DFW would’ve done with this material. Granted, the result would’ve been a 1000-page behemoth replete with footnotes and obsessive ruminations on PCV tubing or whatever, but it just might have represented some kind of definitive summa of our times.
One more thing. It may or may not be relevant, but my mom just borrowed War from me. This is alarming for a number of reasons, none of which I'll go into now. She thinks it's pretty cool, in case you're wondering. I kinda doubt she’s looking for a “definitive summa of our times”, though, so take that into account.
In a way, though, War isn’t a bad advertisement for what used to be called the masculine virtues. The men profiled here are incredibly brave, thrillingly competent and, within the confines of their unit, totally accountable. In other words, they’re sort of what your dad was like before you got to know him better. Except that these guys are twenty-year-old kids, for the most part. In that respect, the book is also a pretty good advertisement for the US army, which, say what you will, still knows how to turn borderline delinquents into very fine soldiers.
Of course, there’s a big OTOH looming here. If the army straightened these young men out to some extent—many were just a drinking binge away from prison when they signed up—15 months in a combat zone, amid a tiny, inward-looking fraternity, has pretty much ruined them for anything else. Most of them are smart and self-aware enough to realize this, but helpless to do anything about it.
Maybe the scariest insight provided by War isn’t that combat is horrific—we already knew that—but that it’s dangerously seductive. Deep down, many soldiers simply love to fight. Well, “simply” is the wrong word: there’s a ton of fear and guilt mixed in, but like any twisted relationship, this one's based on a perverse attraction. As Junger puts it:
War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is different. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men…These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.
Speaking as a formerly young man, I think that's a pretty astute observation. Then again, I’ve never fired a shot in anger with anything more powerful than a squirt gun, so what do I know?
I hate to get all effete and artsy-fartsy about such a manly book, but War does have one or two aesthetic shortcomings. I came to it fresh from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is basically the K2 of literary non-fiction, so I was sometimes frustrated by Junger’s pedestrian prose, which goes hand with his journalistic matter-of-factness. There’s nothing wrong with journalism—and only a truly hardcore journalist would even consider spending a year in the shittiest shithole in all of Afghanistan—but I can’t help wondering what a Rebecca West or, better yet, a DFW would’ve done with this material. Granted, the result would’ve been a 1000-page behemoth replete with footnotes and obsessive ruminations on PCV tubing or whatever, but it just might have represented some kind of definitive summa of our times.
One more thing. It may or may not be relevant, but my mom just borrowed War from me. This is alarming for a number of reasons, none of which I'll go into now. She thinks it's pretty cool, in case you're wondering. I kinda doubt she’s looking for a “definitive summa of our times”, though, so take that into account.
May 31, 2019
War is my second book by Junger, and I found it to be even better than Tribe. He has a thoughtful, though also analytical approach to this subject and his style of writing is engaging, reading almost like fiction. If only it were fiction. War is an unflinching portrait of a reality human's have contended with and participated in almost since the dawn of civilization. He details his own experiences as a reporter, his relationship with the soldiers, their attitudes, fears, the trust and brotherhood between them and even small pleasures that make the precarious situations in which they find themselves bearable. Junger honors those who fight, as he follows them over the course of 15 months in Afghanistan. I found this to be a truly fascinating, moving read and not one I will be quick to forget. This is an author I will return to, I am sure of that.
Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com
Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com
December 27, 2018
I tend to avoid non-fiction books about war but I'm so glad I read this one. Junger's account of a platoon in Afghanistan is educational and scary. The question that resonated the most with me is - what place do these soldiers have in our society when coming home? The strengths they exhibit in combat mostly translate to weaknesses in everyday life. There is no happy ending in War.
April 1, 2023
Written by embedded journalist Sebastian Junger, I have found this a profoundly interesting insight into the actions and more importantly in my opinion the reactions of men in second platoon of Battle Company while in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Vaguely thematic through each of the books (chapters) I found myself absorbed in trying to understand how soldiers under the pressure of war in the most dangerous part of Afghanistan dealt with not only, as the book headings suggest, fear, killing and what Junger called love, the bonding they had with their fellow platoon members.
Highly recommended.
Book One. Fear.
New York City Six. Months later.
I came to think of O’Byrne as a stand-in for the entire platoon, a way to understand a group of men who I don’t think entirely understood themselves.
Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, Spring 2007.
There was only one rock to hide behind, and Vendenberge was using it, so O’Byrne got behind him. ‘Fuck, I can’t believe they just shot at me’ he yelled. Vendenberge was a huge blond man who spoke slowly and was very, very smart. ‘Well’ he said ‘I don’t know if they were shooting at you……’ ‘Okay’ O’Byrne said ‘shooting at us…..’
I can see incoming rounds sparking off the top of the wall. I keep trying to stand up and shoot video, but psychologically it’s almost impossible; my head feels vulnerable as an eggshell. All I want to do is protect it.
“I guarantee you, half of First Platoon is going to be divorced by the time this is over,” Kearney told me early on in the tour. The cook started talking to a finger puppet as a way of coping, but that unnerved the other men so much that one of them finally destroyed it.
One species of bird sounds exactly like incoming rocket propelled grenades; the men call them “RPG birds” and can’t keep themselves from flinching whenever they hear them.
As a civilian among solders I was aware that a failure of nerve by me could put other men at risk, and that idea was almost as mortifying as the very real dangers up there. The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy – anxiety, panic, foreboding - and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.
The men sleep as much as they can, every chance they get, far beyond the needs of the human body. “If you sleep twelve hours a day it’s only a seven month deployment” one soldier explained.
Book Two. Killing.
Five people are dead in Yaka Chine, along with ten wounded, and the elders declare jihad against every American in the valley.
“I worry about the rest of the guys” Raeon says. “Some of them are takin’ it real bad, kind of blamin’ themselves because we couldn’t push over the top. But the thing they got to understand is that he was dead instantly – there’s just nothin’ we could do to get there”
Raeon lights his cigarette and exhales.
“I go on leave in two weeks” he says, “it’s not how I wanted to go though”
Brennan doesn’t survive surgery. Medoza is dead before he even leaves the ridge. Five more men are wounded. Then there’s Rougle from the day before, as well as Rice and Vandenberge. It’s been a costly week that makes the people back home think that maybe we’re losing the war.
“And Mendoza’s a fuckin hero, right?” he said. “He’s an American Hero, right?” “Yeah, he’s a hero” “And Brennan was dead. Right?” O’Byrne said. "I mean they weren’t dragging him out alive, were they?” I wasn’t sure what to say. Soldiers can seem pretty accepting of the idea that they might die in combat, but being taken alive is a different matter. “No, he didn’t die until later,” I said. “He was alive at the time.”
I concentrate on running the camera. That is the easiest way to avoid thinking about the fact that what you’re filming could kill you. “All right, you stay in there” Captain Thyng tells the gunner. “We’re going to pull up around the corner ----“
And that as far as it gets.
They have a huge shoulder fired rocket called a Javelin, for example, that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
“It’s like crack” he yelled, “you can’t get a better high.” I asked him how he was ever going to go back to civilian life. “He shook his head. “I have no idea”
A few minutes later it happens again. No one knows what it is but later I find out they were sniper rounds fired from way down-valley – off-target but still boring fiercely through the darkness bearing their tiny load of death.
Book Three. Love
A new private nicknamed Spanky overreached a bit and tattooed his left arm with a face that was half angel, half devil. When sergeant Mac saw it he demanded to know what the fuck in meant. “It represents the angels and the devils I have to wake up to every morning, sar’n.” Spanky said. After the laughter died down Mac told him he was better off saying he got really fucked up one night and doesn’t remember getting it. “Now repeat that a few times so it sounds believable” he said.
It’s a foolish and embarrassing thought but worth owning up to. Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily — that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind — but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defence of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing else you’d rather do.
He had thick limbs and crazy farmhand strength and when he teamed up with Jones — which was most of the time — you’d need half a squad to defend yourself. Ultimately, it made me think that if you deprive men of the company of women for too long, and then turn off the steady adrenaline drip of heavy combat, it may not turn sexual, but it’s certainly going to turn weird.
I once asked Cortez whether he would risk his life for other men in the platoon. “I’d actually throw myself on the hand grenade for them,” he said. I asked him why. “Because I actually love my brothers,” he said. “I mean, it’s a brotherhood. Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me.”
The men are looking down and avoiding each other’s gazes. Many are smoking cigarettes and others look close to tears. Kearney repeats the information he has — nine dead, nine wounded — and then tells them that one of the dead is Abad. “I guarantee you that if he hadn’t been doing his job when he died, there’d probably be more soldiers out there dead right now,” Kearney says. “So take honor in the fact that you guys trained up one hell of a fucking soldier.”
Battle will not go out of the valley with one last monster firefight. Most of the men seem relieved. A few are clearly disappointed. Someone who was probably going to get shot will now be going home alive and whole.
Vicenza, Italy. Three Months Later.
We get up to go and O’Byrne turns to me as we walk out the door. “See?” he says. “See why I hate the Army?” The Army that saved O’Byrne from himself is now destroying the very man it created — or at least that’s how it seems to O’Byrne.
Highly recommended.
Book One. Fear.
New York City Six. Months later.
I came to think of O’Byrne as a stand-in for the entire platoon, a way to understand a group of men who I don’t think entirely understood themselves.
Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, Spring 2007.
There was only one rock to hide behind, and Vendenberge was using it, so O’Byrne got behind him. ‘Fuck, I can’t believe they just shot at me’ he yelled. Vendenberge was a huge blond man who spoke slowly and was very, very smart. ‘Well’ he said ‘I don’t know if they were shooting at you……’ ‘Okay’ O’Byrne said ‘shooting at us…..’
I can see incoming rounds sparking off the top of the wall. I keep trying to stand up and shoot video, but psychologically it’s almost impossible; my head feels vulnerable as an eggshell. All I want to do is protect it.
“I guarantee you, half of First Platoon is going to be divorced by the time this is over,” Kearney told me early on in the tour. The cook started talking to a finger puppet as a way of coping, but that unnerved the other men so much that one of them finally destroyed it.
One species of bird sounds exactly like incoming rocket propelled grenades; the men call them “RPG birds” and can’t keep themselves from flinching whenever they hear them.
As a civilian among solders I was aware that a failure of nerve by me could put other men at risk, and that idea was almost as mortifying as the very real dangers up there. The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy – anxiety, panic, foreboding - and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.
The men sleep as much as they can, every chance they get, far beyond the needs of the human body. “If you sleep twelve hours a day it’s only a seven month deployment” one soldier explained.
Book Two. Killing.
Five people are dead in Yaka Chine, along with ten wounded, and the elders declare jihad against every American in the valley.
“I worry about the rest of the guys” Raeon says. “Some of them are takin’ it real bad, kind of blamin’ themselves because we couldn’t push over the top. But the thing they got to understand is that he was dead instantly – there’s just nothin’ we could do to get there”
Raeon lights his cigarette and exhales.
“I go on leave in two weeks” he says, “it’s not how I wanted to go though”
Brennan doesn’t survive surgery. Medoza is dead before he even leaves the ridge. Five more men are wounded. Then there’s Rougle from the day before, as well as Rice and Vandenberge. It’s been a costly week that makes the people back home think that maybe we’re losing the war.
“And Mendoza’s a fuckin hero, right?” he said. “He’s an American Hero, right?” “Yeah, he’s a hero” “And Brennan was dead. Right?” O’Byrne said. "I mean they weren’t dragging him out alive, were they?” I wasn’t sure what to say. Soldiers can seem pretty accepting of the idea that they might die in combat, but being taken alive is a different matter. “No, he didn’t die until later,” I said. “He was alive at the time.”
I concentrate on running the camera. That is the easiest way to avoid thinking about the fact that what you’re filming could kill you. “All right, you stay in there” Captain Thyng tells the gunner. “We’re going to pull up around the corner ----“
And that as far as it gets.
They have a huge shoulder fired rocket called a Javelin, for example, that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
“It’s like crack” he yelled, “you can’t get a better high.” I asked him how he was ever going to go back to civilian life. “He shook his head. “I have no idea”
A few minutes later it happens again. No one knows what it is but later I find out they were sniper rounds fired from way down-valley – off-target but still boring fiercely through the darkness bearing their tiny load of death.
Book Three. Love
A new private nicknamed Spanky overreached a bit and tattooed his left arm with a face that was half angel, half devil. When sergeant Mac saw it he demanded to know what the fuck in meant. “It represents the angels and the devils I have to wake up to every morning, sar’n.” Spanky said. After the laughter died down Mac told him he was better off saying he got really fucked up one night and doesn’t remember getting it. “Now repeat that a few times so it sounds believable” he said.
It’s a foolish and embarrassing thought but worth owning up to. Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily — that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind — but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defence of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing else you’d rather do.
He had thick limbs and crazy farmhand strength and when he teamed up with Jones — which was most of the time — you’d need half a squad to defend yourself. Ultimately, it made me think that if you deprive men of the company of women for too long, and then turn off the steady adrenaline drip of heavy combat, it may not turn sexual, but it’s certainly going to turn weird.
I once asked Cortez whether he would risk his life for other men in the platoon. “I’d actually throw myself on the hand grenade for them,” he said. I asked him why. “Because I actually love my brothers,” he said. “I mean, it’s a brotherhood. Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me.”
The men are looking down and avoiding each other’s gazes. Many are smoking cigarettes and others look close to tears. Kearney repeats the information he has — nine dead, nine wounded — and then tells them that one of the dead is Abad. “I guarantee you that if he hadn’t been doing his job when he died, there’d probably be more soldiers out there dead right now,” Kearney says. “So take honor in the fact that you guys trained up one hell of a fucking soldier.”
Battle will not go out of the valley with one last monster firefight. Most of the men seem relieved. A few are clearly disappointed. Someone who was probably going to get shot will now be going home alive and whole.
Vicenza, Italy. Three Months Later.
We get up to go and O’Byrne turns to me as we walk out the door. “See?” he says. “See why I hate the Army?” The Army that saved O’Byrne from himself is now destroying the very man it created — or at least that’s how it seems to O’Byrne.
September 16, 2017
This incredible piece of journalism, written by Sebastian Junger, should be read by each and every citizen. Mr. Junger spent 15 months with a platoon whose base was in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan, known as the Korengal Valley. The base was known as the Korengal Outpost (KOP). Mr. Junger's investigative piece was written for Vanity Fair magazine.
I did not want to inject my personal or political opinions into this review; however, I've come to the conclusion that my personal and political opinions and feelings are inseparable from who I am, and how I ultimately felt about this book stemmed directly from those feelings and opinions. Mr. Junger, however was not so biased... he reported exactly what he saw, experienced and what this group of soldiers related to him in the period of time in which he was embedded with them.
There were several parts to this book. One part dealt with the mechanics of war... all of the military terminology, weaponry,ammunition and all the logistics associated with warfare. Mr. Junger was very thorough... he described everything from hand grenades to M4 assault rifles that fired 203s... bullets that explode on impact and travel at the rate of 2,000 mph. Mr. Junger also provided many physics lessons throughout this book... explaining that these particular bullets travel faster than the speed of sound so the gunshot actually arrives a full second before it can be heard by the human ear. He provided geography lessons about the terrain of Afghanistan. The topography is brutal and rugged and reading about it explained why no military power dating back to Alexander the Great has ever been able to get a foothold in this country.
The parts of this book that were most interesting to me though are the sociological and psychological aspects of war.. the psychology of a soldier. Mr. Junger talked about and followed closely this particular small group of soldiers and what struck me is that the personal and character qualities that make a good soldier do not necessarily make a good law-abiding citizen. These men spend months (and sometimes years) living with adrenaline rushes, fear and even complete boredom. It seemed to me , through the interviews Mr.Junger did with these particular soldiers, that a person cannot, over a long period of time, continue on this continuum of extreme emotions without lasting psychological effects.
The most startling aspect of Mr. Junger's book was to read his conclusion... which he arrived at through his interviews of the soldiers themselves after they had returned home. He writes.." Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. Throughout history, men have come home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake." I really thought about this statement and although at first, it seemed strange, it began to actually make some sense. Through Mr. Junger's writing, it became clear to me that what happens between these people is the development of a 'brotherhood'.... an intimacy... that cannot possibly be replicated in civilian life. These soldiers rely on each other to simply stay alive.. which is probably one of the most profound things human beings can experience.
I found this book to be very illuminating and it provided a lot of insight I was looking for into the social dynamics that occur among soldiers in combat. What Mr. Junger's book also provided was, I believe, a wake up call to all citizens and the politicians who seem to so casually send these awe-inspiring human beings to war. We all need to really be aware of and try to understand the effects that war has on these soldiers. It is obvious to me, that these men and women need support for their very special needs when they return home. And it is our duty and responsibility to no longer turn a blind eye to these needs. 'Thank you for your service' is a nice sentiment but is not nearly enough.
I did not want to inject my personal or political opinions into this review; however, I've come to the conclusion that my personal and political opinions and feelings are inseparable from who I am, and how I ultimately felt about this book stemmed directly from those feelings and opinions. Mr. Junger, however was not so biased... he reported exactly what he saw, experienced and what this group of soldiers related to him in the period of time in which he was embedded with them.
There were several parts to this book. One part dealt with the mechanics of war... all of the military terminology, weaponry,ammunition and all the logistics associated with warfare. Mr. Junger was very thorough... he described everything from hand grenades to M4 assault rifles that fired 203s... bullets that explode on impact and travel at the rate of 2,000 mph. Mr. Junger also provided many physics lessons throughout this book... explaining that these particular bullets travel faster than the speed of sound so the gunshot actually arrives a full second before it can be heard by the human ear. He provided geography lessons about the terrain of Afghanistan. The topography is brutal and rugged and reading about it explained why no military power dating back to Alexander the Great has ever been able to get a foothold in this country.
The parts of this book that were most interesting to me though are the sociological and psychological aspects of war.. the psychology of a soldier. Mr. Junger talked about and followed closely this particular small group of soldiers and what struck me is that the personal and character qualities that make a good soldier do not necessarily make a good law-abiding citizen. These men spend months (and sometimes years) living with adrenaline rushes, fear and even complete boredom. It seemed to me , through the interviews Mr.Junger did with these particular soldiers, that a person cannot, over a long period of time, continue on this continuum of extreme emotions without lasting psychological effects.
The most startling aspect of Mr. Junger's book was to read his conclusion... which he arrived at through his interviews of the soldiers themselves after they had returned home. He writes.." Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. Throughout history, men have come home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake." I really thought about this statement and although at first, it seemed strange, it began to actually make some sense. Through Mr. Junger's writing, it became clear to me that what happens between these people is the development of a 'brotherhood'.... an intimacy... that cannot possibly be replicated in civilian life. These soldiers rely on each other to simply stay alive.. which is probably one of the most profound things human beings can experience.
I found this book to be very illuminating and it provided a lot of insight I was looking for into the social dynamics that occur among soldiers in combat. What Mr. Junger's book also provided was, I believe, a wake up call to all citizens and the politicians who seem to so casually send these awe-inspiring human beings to war. We all need to really be aware of and try to understand the effects that war has on these soldiers. It is obvious to me, that these men and women need support for their very special needs when they return home. And it is our duty and responsibility to no longer turn a blind eye to these needs. 'Thank you for your service' is a nice sentiment but is not nearly enough.
August 20, 2010
This is a phenomenal book and should be required reading for all the knee jerk liberals like me who have had nothing but disdain for the military. What impressed Junger the most during his several months series of embedments with the US army in Afghanistan was the closeness of the men in his units. These soldiers didn't talk about bringing democracy to Afghanistan or any other political or social raison d'etre for their being in what could be described as a Hell on earth. Their only goal was to protect each other from dying even at the risk of dying themselves. This was the theme throughout the book and fortunately, Junger is better at describing what he lived through than I am at summarizing what he wrote. He recounts being with a sixteen man unit in the Taliban infested mountains of Afghanistan under unbelievable conditions. Most of the time, there was one hundred degree plus heat, travel for miles on foot with 75-100 pounds on your back, very few showers, no hot meals and little sleep. This was all in addition to Taliban fighters trying to kill you at any opportunity. There was an adrenaline high for the soldiers involved in combat and always the fear that you might let down one of your comrades and be responsible for his death.
There was a great deal of war in War, but Junger does more than bloody battles and provides an enlightening account of backgrounds and psychological make-up of the men he served with as well as history, geography, tactics, weapons resulting in a spellbinding book which, ironically, I finished on Memorial Day.
There was a great deal of war in War, but Junger does more than bloody battles and provides an enlightening account of backgrounds and psychological make-up of the men he served with as well as history, geography, tactics, weapons resulting in a spellbinding book which, ironically, I finished on Memorial Day.
August 1, 2010
I am constantly asking myself why I am so fascinated with the detailed accounts of combat. I don't have an answer. Since I was a boy I devoured memoirs of the Vietnam experience and todays accounts of Iraq and Afghanistan draw my interest in the same manner. Having never experienced combat I still wonder how it looks, smells, sounds.... books can communicate all that, but not how it really feels. Some come close, and Jungers book comes as close as I think is possible. So close that I didn't come away stimulated and entertained, but worn out, frustrated, sad and angry. Still, it's a great book and I highly recommend it.
If you follow the headlines then you may know that the Korengal Valley, the setting in WAR, has been abandoned by US forces after five years of bloody fighting. With that in mind what is relayed in the book becomes that much more heartbreaking. The sacrifice of the young Americans, and the unknown trials of the men they're fighting becomes void of meaning and just another exercise in mans inhumanity to man. Young men growing so callous about killing, and even relishing in seeing another man blown apart is of concern. The lack of respect for property and another's way of life is troubling.
I liked the segments about the brotherhood that develops among the soldiers and Jungers analysis drawing on decades of research from many sources about how and why that occurs. The psychology and motivation of human beings at war was fascinating and enlightening
I watched the Sebastian Junger/Tim Hetherington documentary RESTREPO (a video diary of the same story) the day after I finished WAR. I was glad to have more detailed knowledge of the circumstances depicted in the film, but it only added to the uncomfortable feeling brought on by the book. I find myself questioning everything iv ever thought about the conduct of warfare.
There are incidences of honor and heroism in WAR. I respect and appreciate the volunteerism, sacrifice and courage of those who choose to fight, in the face of something I surely don't understand.
If you follow the headlines then you may know that the Korengal Valley, the setting in WAR, has been abandoned by US forces after five years of bloody fighting. With that in mind what is relayed in the book becomes that much more heartbreaking. The sacrifice of the young Americans, and the unknown trials of the men they're fighting becomes void of meaning and just another exercise in mans inhumanity to man. Young men growing so callous about killing, and even relishing in seeing another man blown apart is of concern. The lack of respect for property and another's way of life is troubling.
I liked the segments about the brotherhood that develops among the soldiers and Jungers analysis drawing on decades of research from many sources about how and why that occurs. The psychology and motivation of human beings at war was fascinating and enlightening
I watched the Sebastian Junger/Tim Hetherington documentary RESTREPO (a video diary of the same story) the day after I finished WAR. I was glad to have more detailed knowledge of the circumstances depicted in the film, but it only added to the uncomfortable feeling brought on by the book. I find myself questioning everything iv ever thought about the conduct of warfare.
There are incidences of honor and heroism in WAR. I respect and appreciate the volunteerism, sacrifice and courage of those who choose to fight, in the face of something I surely don't understand.
July 20, 2014
Opening Line: “O’Byrne and the men of Battle Company arrived in the last week of May when the rivers were running full and the upper peaks still held snow.”
Great cover on this, a haunting image and an equally powerful read. Written by Sabastian Junger (of The Perfect Storm fame) In WAR he spends 15 months following a single platoon based at a remote outpost in Eastern Afghanistan. His objective is simple, to convey what soldiers experience, what war actually feels like.
Divided into 3 “books”: Fear, Killing, and Love from the very first pages you are dropped right onto into the thick of it. Arriving on a remote hilltop in one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous outposts in the Korengal Valley. Here Junger gives insight into the truths of combat, how these soldiers live and what they see. He describes things that few civilians will ever witness or go through; the fear, the anticipation, the honor and the trust among men. Their outpost is inaccessible, hot, hilly, remote and mortally dangerous. It’s also home to (as I’ve come to understand) the ultimate testosterone filled boys club.
As with The Perfect Storm this is not so much a story or novel but a series of events (patrols/battles) tied together with the mechanics of war. How fast bullets travel, military strategy & history, studies on fear and courage and body armour. Lots of things you didn’t know you wanted to know. Junger also manages to get some fairly intimate stories from the men; and you do get a feel for them as they describe what it means to fight, why they’re serving, how they deal with boredom interspaced with sheer adrenaline, chaos and terror and how life will never be more pure or sharp than in that moment when there’s a good chance that you could die.
Between the sounds of gunfire and the agony of loss there are also some surprisingly funny moments, the jocularity and bromance of these guys who may not even like each other but would also die for their “brothers” It is the ultimate commitment not so much to their job but to each other.
Junger does spend some time (at the beginning and end) describing how the men are adjusting back to civilian life and I wish I could say something positive about that.
WAR is gritty, raw, eye opening, funny, adrenaline charged, futile and heartfelt.
Great cover on this, a haunting image and an equally powerful read. Written by Sabastian Junger (of The Perfect Storm fame) In WAR he spends 15 months following a single platoon based at a remote outpost in Eastern Afghanistan. His objective is simple, to convey what soldiers experience, what war actually feels like.
Divided into 3 “books”: Fear, Killing, and Love from the very first pages you are dropped right onto into the thick of it. Arriving on a remote hilltop in one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous outposts in the Korengal Valley. Here Junger gives insight into the truths of combat, how these soldiers live and what they see. He describes things that few civilians will ever witness or go through; the fear, the anticipation, the honor and the trust among men. Their outpost is inaccessible, hot, hilly, remote and mortally dangerous. It’s also home to (as I’ve come to understand) the ultimate testosterone filled boys club.
As with The Perfect Storm this is not so much a story or novel but a series of events (patrols/battles) tied together with the mechanics of war. How fast bullets travel, military strategy & history, studies on fear and courage and body armour. Lots of things you didn’t know you wanted to know. Junger also manages to get some fairly intimate stories from the men; and you do get a feel for them as they describe what it means to fight, why they’re serving, how they deal with boredom interspaced with sheer adrenaline, chaos and terror and how life will never be more pure or sharp than in that moment when there’s a good chance that you could die.
Between the sounds of gunfire and the agony of loss there are also some surprisingly funny moments, the jocularity and bromance of these guys who may not even like each other but would also die for their “brothers” It is the ultimate commitment not so much to their job but to each other.
Junger does spend some time (at the beginning and end) describing how the men are adjusting back to civilian life and I wish I could say something positive about that.
WAR is gritty, raw, eye opening, funny, adrenaline charged, futile and heartfelt.
August 30, 2020
Junger was partnered with photo journalist Tim Hetherington in the Korengal valley a little over 10 years ago now. Time flies, even if you're not having fun. Both men were embedded with US troops; not continuously, but for enough time on frequent stays to have been exposed to many of the same dangers. They were dependent on the Army for rations and accommodation, and both shared the soldiers' lot on patrol and in camp.
Junger has a true interest in the lives of the soldiers and their reactions to the stresses of war, and this interest is not restricted to the time that he spent among them. He maintained contact with some after returning stateside and is therefore able to comment on the trouble these soldiers had readjusting to civilian life afterward.
Even though I was aware of the overall outcome of these military operations, Junger had me spellbound with his accounts of armed conflict, usually an easy enough thing for a writer to do. But I found that my interest did not slacken when he recorded details of camp life and reported on the soldiers' take on the war.
The author also plunges into the psychological aspects of warfare and quotes studies that explore the masculine impulses and brotherhood that make a unit cohesive and motivates individuals to do, as a unit, something that is so batshit crazy that none of them would do it as an individual.
As a last sad parting note, Junger writes a tribute to his partner Tim Hetherington, wishing him well and stating Junger's hope that they can work together in the future. The book was published in 2010; Hetherington would die on the job a year later.
I'm going to keep this book around. I know I'll be reading it again later.
Junger has a true interest in the lives of the soldiers and their reactions to the stresses of war, and this interest is not restricted to the time that he spent among them. He maintained contact with some after returning stateside and is therefore able to comment on the trouble these soldiers had readjusting to civilian life afterward.
Even though I was aware of the overall outcome of these military operations, Junger had me spellbound with his accounts of armed conflict, usually an easy enough thing for a writer to do. But I found that my interest did not slacken when he recorded details of camp life and reported on the soldiers' take on the war.
The author also plunges into the psychological aspects of warfare and quotes studies that explore the masculine impulses and brotherhood that make a unit cohesive and motivates individuals to do, as a unit, something that is so batshit crazy that none of them would do it as an individual.
As a last sad parting note, Junger writes a tribute to his partner Tim Hetherington, wishing him well and stating Junger's hope that they can work together in the future. The book was published in 2010; Hetherington would die on the job a year later.
I'm going to keep this book around. I know I'll be reading it again later.
May 30, 2014
Sebastian Junger is the author of,"The Perfect Storm" and this book "War". His Oscar-nominated documentary "Restrepo," won the 2010 grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Sebastian Junger spent 5 months in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, 25 miles from Pakistan border. The area is extremely isolated, rugged and mountainous terrain. The summers are blistering hot, the winters are ice cold. The valley is only 6 miles long but 70% of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped here and 42 American soldiers have died fighting here. It has been called "The Valley of Death" by American forces.
There are 2 million American vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and 22 of those vets take their lives every single day. I’ve often wondered why a soldier who has survived the horrors of combat, watched as his friends have gone home in body bags, does not get out of the military. Why do they reenlist? Junger illustrates why in this very perceptive, honest, non judgmental piece of journalism.
What I found fascinating about this book was how the author was able to show the psychological effects of being in combat, not in a detached, clinical way, but in an expressive way so that a civilian like me can understand it.
Junger describes battles where soldiers will run straight toward their deaths to try to save a comrade who has been wounded. Wounded men have been known to sneak away from the safety of hospitals to return to their buddies to help them, because, “my guys need me”.
The best performing units in combat are the ones where each soldier in that unit considers the survival of the group more important than the survival of the individual.
When soldiers are in a high intensity combat situation they grow completely dependent on each other to stay alive. The cohesion that this dependence fosters is like no other bond in existence. These men feel so responsible for each other, if someone dies; they suffer debilitating survivors’ guilt. It’s not about the adrenalin rush and thrill of combat. One can get that from skydiving or other extreme sports. It is about feeling like an indispensible, valued member of a tribe. It is the most constructive they have ever felt in their lives. They know what their presence in that unit is a matter of life or death to guy standing next to him.
If these guys could get that same feeling from a normal job at home, they would probably never go into battle again. The problem is, they can’t get this at home. That combat psychology, that bond soldiers form when they are willing to lay down their life for another person, can’t be duplicated anywhere else but in war. As the author puts it, “The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire. The experience of brotherhood (not courage) changes some men so profoundly; they don’t want to live life without it.”
When these same men return home, they feel an empty void where that feeling of “being needed” is absent. They miss it so much they are willing to return to the hell of war, risk life and limb, literally, to fill that emptiness. Not because they enjoy the thrill of being shot at, bombed and attacked. They miss the strong camaraderie and brotherhood that is such a unique side product of being in combat. It is something that can not be duplicated in any single way back in regular life, so these soldiers return again and again, and never leave. As Sebastian Junger puts it, “Maybe the ultimate wound in combat, is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.”
* RESTREPO: http://restrepothemovie.com/
Restrepo is a 2010 American documentary film that plunges viewers into the experiences of soldiers on the front lines of the war in Afghanistan. It was directed by Sebastian Junger and late British/American photojournalist Tim Hetherington. Restrepo received the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and a certified fresh rating of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.
* KORENGAL: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
Korengal Sebastian Junger's 2014 follow-up documentary to Restrepo. Korengal picks up where Restrepo left off; same men, same valley, same commanders, but a different look at the experience.
April 20, 2022
This book blew me away and probably one of the best war books that I've read. This is not so much a biography on Afghanistan that focuses on a single soldier like Blehm or Krakauer's excellent books. It is to a large degree the war seen through Junger's lens. He does not go for the cheap dramatic scenes.
Junger is a journalist and visited and was embedded with an infantry platoon at Restrepo. Restrepo was a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan and the valley was so dangerous that the soldiers there experienced 10x the number of firefights as other U.S. military in Afghanistan. Junger visited the post four different times in 2008. He was shot at one more than once and his Humvee was even blown up.
Junger does an excellent job of integrating the landscape into the narrative for vivid descriptions. One learns for example that the region is the lumber capital of Afghanistan and that Islam did not come to the region until the 20th century.
He follows the stories of several soldiers and while narrative is about the local firefights to a large degree, Junger opines on the larger concept of war. He also brings his own experiences which are essential to the strong narrative in my opinion.
5 stars. Excellent read.
Junger is a journalist and visited and was embedded with an infantry platoon at Restrepo. Restrepo was a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan and the valley was so dangerous that the soldiers there experienced 10x the number of firefights as other U.S. military in Afghanistan. Junger visited the post four different times in 2008. He was shot at one more than once and his Humvee was even blown up.
Junger does an excellent job of integrating the landscape into the narrative for vivid descriptions. One learns for example that the region is the lumber capital of Afghanistan and that Islam did not come to the region until the 20th century.
He follows the stories of several soldiers and while narrative is about the local firefights to a large degree, Junger opines on the larger concept of war. He also brings his own experiences which are essential to the strong narrative in my opinion.
5 stars. Excellent read.
September 2, 2020
"The Outpost: the Book" ?
"Thank You For Your Service: the Prequel ?"
What's it like to serve at a small US mountain base in Afghanistan, on the very edge of the 'War on Terrorism' ? 18 months of live-in journalism paint a frank picture.
Nothing compares to the intensity of combat. Nothing is more important than to not let the team down. Those mantras sum up the mentality of Battle Brigade. These truths are the greatest barrier to re-entering civilian life or even a highly regimented garrison environment.
Dark humor. Weapon fetishism. Gay vibes that are not. The longing for a Custer stand in spite of everything. A frame of psychology (drawn from the US Army's own research) and a surprising sprinkling of anthropology guide the outsider through less exported aspects of frontier life.
What about the Afghans ? The overwhelming firepower of the US Army is countered by the need for a 'hearts and minds' towards the civilians in the mountain villages, whose elders were young when the Soviets sparked a popular uprising with their Montfortesque strategy of indiscriminate shooting. This time, an elder will occasionally tell the local Taliban to pack his bags for Pakistan, since they get amenities such as new roads, food, a well, a school etc... IF things remain quiet. Humanitarian philosophy and politics aside, each ally is one less enemy.
"Thank You For Your Service: the Prequel ?"
What's it like to serve at a small US mountain base in Afghanistan, on the very edge of the 'War on Terrorism' ? 18 months of live-in journalism paint a frank picture.
Nothing compares to the intensity of combat. Nothing is more important than to not let the team down. Those mantras sum up the mentality of Battle Brigade. These truths are the greatest barrier to re-entering civilian life or even a highly regimented garrison environment.
Dark humor. Weapon fetishism. Gay vibes that are not. The longing for a Custer stand in spite of everything. A frame of psychology (drawn from the US Army's own research) and a surprising sprinkling of anthropology guide the outsider through less exported aspects of frontier life.
What about the Afghans ? The overwhelming firepower of the US Army is countered by the need for a 'hearts and minds' towards the civilians in the mountain villages, whose elders were young when the Soviets sparked a popular uprising with their Montfortesque strategy of indiscriminate shooting. This time, an elder will occasionally tell the local Taliban to pack his bags for Pakistan, since they get amenities such as new roads, food, a well, a school etc... IF things remain quiet. Humanitarian philosophy and politics aside, each ally is one less enemy.
Read
July 15, 2022I hope this is as close as I ever get to being shot at. This book is that real, that immediate. Junger follows the 173rd Airborne’s Battle Company into the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Next to the definition of Hell on Earth in the dictionary? That’s the Korengal Valley. The weather (“Summer grinds on: A hundred degrees every day and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat.”) and the terrain (“The last stretch is an absurdly steep climb through the village of Babiyal that the men call “the Stairmaster.””) would have challenged Atilla the Hun, except that Atilla was smart enough not to invade Afghanistan.
As if the weather and the terrain aren’t bad enough, they’re also fighting the culture. “Most Korengalis have never left their village and have almost no understanding of the world beyond the mouth of the valley. That makes it a perfect place in which to base an insurgency dedicated to fighting outsiders. One old man in the valley thought the American soldiers were actually Russians who had simply stayed after the Soviet army pulled out in 1989.”
How tough are these guys? “Battle Company is taking the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion is taking the most contact - by far - of any in the U.S. military. 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. Seventy percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped in and around the Korengal Valley.”
Good thing they’re tough, because everyone is shooting at them (“The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap. That’s the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.”). And that’s just when they’re staying “safe” (hah!) behind the wire of Restrepo, an outpost named for a medic who died in combat. “Restrepo was extremely well liked because he was brave under fire and absolutely committed to the men. If you got sick he would take your guard shift; if you were depressed he’d come to your hooch and play guitar.”
This is an on the ground, eyewitness account of men at war, today, this minute, our guys in Afghanistan at work. The prose is clear and sharp and while Junger is inevitably a part of the story, he doesn’t put himself forward too often and he never makes the mistake of thinking anything but the men of Battle Company are the subject.
The larger subject is, of course, war, and Junger does go there later in the book. Armies have a vested interest in figuring out what makes a man fight and fight well, and Junger cities a lot of studies and makes a praiseworthy attempt at explaining why men fight. Testosterone and other hardwired biological stimuli come into it, as you knew they would, but that’s not all there is to it. “The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless metanalyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love.”
The men of Battle Company love combat, and this book is as close as most people will get to understanding that. “Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up.”
But mostly? You come away from this book thinking, Okay, if it is biologically inevitable that young men are going to fight wars? We should pick our fights with more care. These guys are too good to waste.
As if the weather and the terrain aren’t bad enough, they’re also fighting the culture. “Most Korengalis have never left their village and have almost no understanding of the world beyond the mouth of the valley. That makes it a perfect place in which to base an insurgency dedicated to fighting outsiders. One old man in the valley thought the American soldiers were actually Russians who had simply stayed after the Soviet army pulled out in 1989.”
How tough are these guys? “Battle Company is taking the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion is taking the most contact - by far - of any in the U.S. military. 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. Seventy percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped in and around the Korengal Valley.”
Good thing they’re tough, because everyone is shooting at them (“The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap. That’s the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.”). And that’s just when they’re staying “safe” (hah!) behind the wire of Restrepo, an outpost named for a medic who died in combat. “Restrepo was extremely well liked because he was brave under fire and absolutely committed to the men. If you got sick he would take your guard shift; if you were depressed he’d come to your hooch and play guitar.”
This is an on the ground, eyewitness account of men at war, today, this minute, our guys in Afghanistan at work. The prose is clear and sharp and while Junger is inevitably a part of the story, he doesn’t put himself forward too often and he never makes the mistake of thinking anything but the men of Battle Company are the subject.
The larger subject is, of course, war, and Junger does go there later in the book. Armies have a vested interest in figuring out what makes a man fight and fight well, and Junger cities a lot of studies and makes a praiseworthy attempt at explaining why men fight. Testosterone and other hardwired biological stimuli come into it, as you knew they would, but that’s not all there is to it. “The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless metanalyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love.”
The men of Battle Company love combat, and this book is as close as most people will get to understanding that. “Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up.”
But mostly? You come away from this book thinking, Okay, if it is biologically inevitable that young men are going to fight wars? We should pick our fights with more care. These guys are too good to waste.
October 4, 2016
'War' by Sebastian Junger is an outstanding journalist's memoir. I bought the video-enriched Kindle version, which is also outstanding. Besides a map of the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, included were clips from the documentary, 'Restrepo'. In the back of the book is a list of selected sources and references.
The book chronicles a series of five visits by the author and Tim Hetherington, journalist-photographer, from 2007 to 2008, and subsequent events, to an Afghanistan outpost of infantry soldiers on a fourteen-month stay. Junger and Hetherington slept and ate with the men, and tagged along on patrols and visits to villages from the beginning of a thirty-man platoon's stay until they handed off the post to a new crew.
The men were not interested in the political ramifications of the war or the concerns of the generals. The continuous fear of impending attack and the thrill of several battles had whittled the focus of the men down to one thing - the mutual commitment of every man to the safety of the other men in the platoon.
While none of them believe they are brave warriors, I do. They love battle and they love their fellow soldiers. They endure slow quiet hours poorly, with nightmares and anxiety. The adrenaline rush of being a soldier in a firefight is why they do the job. Yet, they suffer tremendous griefs - losses of friends on the field and family back home. They know the risks of losing limbs and other body parts. They see men they consider family closer than brothers shot to pieces in front of them. They are aware of the emotional costs of fear and killing, and they know they will return home as different people, some of whom will never fit in again with ordinary life.
I now have an idea of why volunteer soldiers go to war. This is a world beyond my understanding. But nonetheless, these guys are amazing.
January 19, 2021
The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
In 2007 and 2008, as the war in Afghanistan lingered on, author Junger visited the Korengal Valley to witness the front line in the battles against extremist Muslim resistance forces. From those experiences emerged this book, at once a portrait of modern soldiers and ground warfare as well as a rumination on the universal brotherhood of soldiers. Junger spends little time weighing the morality of the combat itself, choosing instead to focus on the lasting impact of the experience on the lives of the U.S. soldiers. The award-winning documentary Restrepo also sprang from Junger's time spent with the troops.
In 2007 and 2008, as the war in Afghanistan lingered on, author Junger visited the Korengal Valley to witness the front line in the battles against extremist Muslim resistance forces. From those experiences emerged this book, at once a portrait of modern soldiers and ground warfare as well as a rumination on the universal brotherhood of soldiers. Junger spends little time weighing the morality of the combat itself, choosing instead to focus on the lasting impact of the experience on the lives of the U.S. soldiers. The award-winning documentary Restrepo also sprang from Junger's time spent with the troops.
January 20, 2016
Vale de Korengal - Afeganistão - Fotografia Tim Hetherington
O livro ”Guerra” do jornalista norte-americano Sebastian Junger (n. 1962) está dividido em três partes: ”Livro Um – MEDO”, ”Livro Dois – MORTE” e ”Livro Três – AMOR”.
Sebastian Junger segue o segundo pelotão da Companhia de Combate, composta por quatro pelotões da 173ª Brigada Aerotransportada; que está sediado numa base militar denominada Destacamento de Korengal – KOP (Korengal Out Post) – um dos postos mais perigosos no Afeganistão: “demasiado perigoso para conquistar, demasiado fraco para intimidar, demasiado autónomo para subornar.” (Pág. 29) – um local remoto perto da fronteira com o Paquistão, “… um lugar capaz de alterar a mente de uma forma terrível e irreversível.” (Pág. 25)
"Bunker" - Vale de Korengal - Afeganistão - Fotografia Tim Hetherington
”Guerra” é um relato sobre homens, quase todos jovens com idades compreendidas entre os dezanove e os vinte e cinco anos, que são comandados por veteranos de outras guerras; rapazes que fugiram de vidas atribuladas, sem presente e sem futuro, vidas vividas na marginalidade, quase sempre relacionadas com a droga e os roubos; e que se tornam repentinamente soldados, implementando códigos de conduta assentes na amizade e no companheirismo, que são profundamente afectados pela morte dos amigos, os novos camaradas de luta e sofrimento; relatos onde não se enquadra o medo ou a cobardia, que revelam heroicidade, por vezes, irresponsabilidade, mas que também acabam por evidenciar, esgotamento físico e psicológico, com períodos de tédio, propícios a meditações e reflexões profundas.
Base Militar Norte-Americana - Vale de Korengal - Afeganistão - Fotografia Tim Hetherington
”os soldados não se interessam pelo suporte moral da guerra e, para eles, o sucesso ou fracasso a longo prazo é irrelevante.” (Pág. 39)
“Os militares americanos dividem os problemas em duas áreas conceptuais e depois abordam cada uma separadamente. As guerras travam-se em terreno físico - desertos, montanhas, etc. - assim como aquilo a que chamam “terreno humano”. Basicamente, o terreno humano é o aspecto social da guerra, em todas as suas formas confusas e contraditórias.” (Pág. 55)
Os militares norte-americanos e afegãos têm uma dupla função lutar contra os talibãs e estabelecer ligações de amizade e desenvolvimento com os habitantes afegãos do vale, os korongalis; uma luta desigual em termos de equipamentos, qualitativa e quantitativamente; os talibãs não têm o poder aéreo (helicópteros e aviões) norte-americano, mas a utilização sistemática de “snipers”, os ataques surpresa e nocturnos, acabam por produzir resultados funestos, com numerosas baixas humanas.
Sebastian Junger não procura explicar a estratégia ou compreender o desenvolvimento político norte-americano da guerra, mas apenas perceber e desvendar os comportamentos de jovens fortemente armados, amontoados em condições inumanas, em posto de montanha, examinando a sua condição humana perante as circunstâncias excepcionais da guerra, com destaque para inúmeras interrogações: Como funciona o medo? E a coragem? A derrota? O retorno à vida civil?
O soldado Jones a treinar o seu "swing" - Golfe - Vale de Korengal - Afeganistão - Fotografia Tim Hetherington
Sebastian Junger efectua inúmeras reflexões com base num minucioso trabalho de pesquisa, sobre, história militar, medicina, biologia e psicologia; a que associa um excelente trabalho jornalístico, com descrições absolutamente magistrais dos combates, escrevendo e relatando a “guerra”; apesar de referir: “As convenções jornalísticas defendem que não se consegue escrever objectivamente sobre uma pessoa que nos seja próxima, mas reconheçamos que também não se pode escrever objectivamente sobre pessoas que disparam sobre nós.” (Pág. 39) – numa excepcional edição portuguesa da editora Arcádia, uma chancela da babel, com tradução e notas de rodapé perfeitas.
“”Guerra” é o resultado de cinco viagens ao vale de Korengal, na costa leste do Afeganistão, entre Junho de 2007 e Junho de 2008, realizadas para a revista Vanity Fair. Durante esse período, fui “integrado” no Exército americano e dependi totalmente dos militares em termos de abrigo, alimentação, segurança e transporte. Dito isto, nunca me pediram – de forma directa ou indirecta – para alterar nada do que escrevia, nem para mostrar o conteúdo dos meus cadernos de notas e das minhas câmaras. Ao longo destas cinco viagens trabalhei com um fotojornalista chamado Tim Hetherington.
…
Tim e eu filmámos mais de 150 horas de vídeo. Algumas partes desse material passaram na ABC News e foram a base de criação de Restrepo, um documentário produzido e realizado pelos dois.” – in Nota do Autor
Sebastian Junger (n. 1962) é um jornalista norte-americano e Tim Hetherington (1970 – 2011) era um fotojornalista inglês, que morreu a 20 de Abril de 2011, em Misrata, Líbia, vítima de tiros de morteiro das forças de Muammar Gaddafi durante a guerra civil.
Sebastian Junger (left) e Tim Hetherington - Vale de Korengal - Afeganistão - Fotografia Tim Hetherington
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/v...
Restrepo Trailer - National Geographic
May 29, 2021
Perhaps one of the best books about combat ever written, not the history of war but the day-in-day-out horror and tedium that makes up the life of a combat soldier.
Junger was absolutely brilliant in the balancing act he performed between objective journalist and a guy who can’t help but admire the shit out of a bunch of punk kids who have a terrifying job. He was also just profane enough to fully capture the patois of military speak. He could have over-done it (which seems impossible if you’ve ever been around a group of soldiers whose every other word is some form of profanity) to sort of ingratiate himself in the grunt life.
I’ve read a ton of books about war, I’ve even served in the military (does the U.S. Air Force count?—we had maids), but this book brought to life the mind-numbing horror of war along with the intense thrill of shooting and being fired upon.
You definitely want to read this before watching the accompanying documentary, Restrepo.
I appreciate that he didn’t touch on the politics of the war in this book. He wanted to tell the story of the soldiers who were actually doing the fighting. I couldn’t help but think what a fucking useless pile of shit the war was. The Korengal Valley in Afghanistan? Who gives a shit? What did we think would happen when we invaded? Why are we still there twenty years later? These boys were fighting and dying for a lost cause, if you could even call Iraq and Afghanistan causes. I don’t.
I thought that the first American Gulf War was a piece of shit, and I opposed both the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I think I’m on the right side of history. War has settled very few problems in world history and has created an infinite amount of agony.
Junger was absolutely brilliant in the balancing act he performed between objective journalist and a guy who can’t help but admire the shit out of a bunch of punk kids who have a terrifying job. He was also just profane enough to fully capture the patois of military speak. He could have over-done it (which seems impossible if you’ve ever been around a group of soldiers whose every other word is some form of profanity) to sort of ingratiate himself in the grunt life.
I’ve read a ton of books about war, I’ve even served in the military (does the U.S. Air Force count?—we had maids), but this book brought to life the mind-numbing horror of war along with the intense thrill of shooting and being fired upon.
You definitely want to read this before watching the accompanying documentary, Restrepo.
I appreciate that he didn’t touch on the politics of the war in this book. He wanted to tell the story of the soldiers who were actually doing the fighting. I couldn’t help but think what a fucking useless pile of shit the war was. The Korengal Valley in Afghanistan? Who gives a shit? What did we think would happen when we invaded? Why are we still there twenty years later? These boys were fighting and dying for a lost cause, if you could even call Iraq and Afghanistan causes. I don’t.
I thought that the first American Gulf War was a piece of shit, and I opposed both the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I think I’m on the right side of history. War has settled very few problems in world history and has created an infinite amount of agony.
August 20, 2021
Junger's book needs some photos and maps and a glossary, especially the photos...these are real people and we need real faces to go along with our reading. So I'd recommend watching Junger and Hetherington's film Restrepo about halfway through WAR or even before starting it.
As a film, Restrepo explores much of the same ground and time frame as War; it may be more limited than the book in some aspects, but it serves to bring to life the events of Junger's book and adds more of a human dimension to the guys of Battle Company. I watched Restrepo at about the halfway point of reading War, and it helped. I don't think Junger's writing by itself evokes enough personal connections to guys like Pemble, Hijar and Cortez, but Restrepo's close-up interviews and the videos of them in Afghanistan under fire brings these young men to life in a way the book doesn't; the combination of the film and the book adds a crucial dimension to understanding what Junger is writing about, especially the camaraderie that the third part of WAR focuses so closely on.
Even something like the drunken phone footage from the train in Italy early in the film helps set up character and put faces to the names; without it the figure of Restrepo is just a name in Junger's book and the courage based on love that he writes about won't come across as strong and clear as it should.
As a film, Restrepo explores much of the same ground and time frame as War; it may be more limited than the book in some aspects, but it serves to bring to life the events of Junger's book and adds more of a human dimension to the guys of Battle Company. I watched Restrepo at about the halfway point of reading War, and it helped. I don't think Junger's writing by itself evokes enough personal connections to guys like Pemble, Hijar and Cortez, but Restrepo's close-up interviews and the videos of them in Afghanistan under fire brings these young men to life in a way the book doesn't; the combination of the film and the book adds a crucial dimension to understanding what Junger is writing about, especially the camaraderie that the third part of WAR focuses so closely on.
Even something like the drunken phone footage from the train in Italy early in the film helps set up character and put faces to the names; without it the figure of Restrepo is just a name in Junger's book and the courage based on love that he writes about won't come across as strong and clear as it should.
January 4, 2018
A raw and honest account of the psychological and phyiscal dangers a soldier in Afghanistan faces. Specifically for anyone who is interested in the psychology of combat and how a soldier's life beacons at the point of a firefight, only to dwindle after, this is a very good read. It's mostly impressive because Junger was there with the soldiers, experiencing the same thing, except without the ability to pick up a gun and fight alongside them, because of his position as a journalist. I would've so loved this book to be longer, it was massively enjoyable and written in the perfect tone for the subject.
June 3, 2010
This books was ok. I found it to be an enjoyable read but the jumpy narrative was a bit off putting. I kept catching myself skimming paragraphs and some things that should have been explained or pointed out were left for the reader to figure out (like a dushka) whereas, things like mortars, which are pretty simple to understand and many people know what they are, were explained in more detail.
I didn't find many of his theories very insightful as he used mostly psychological studies conducted by other people for his references. He tells us that the soldiers are masters of humour and yet from the dialogue he includes I can tell that there is much funnier material he could have added. The timeline jumps back and forth and it gets a bit confusing. As an embedded journalist I expected his insights to look a little deeper rather than telling us what we kind of already knew. Some paragraphs were beautifully composed and the structure was nice despite the timeline as he would begin by introducing the firefight from the first few shots and then cut off to tell the reader about some surveys and theories before continuing the firefight tale.
I know that I am being very critical but I actually did enjoy reading this book and some features of the structure and composure I admired. I simply expected more.
I didn't find many of his theories very insightful as he used mostly psychological studies conducted by other people for his references. He tells us that the soldiers are masters of humour and yet from the dialogue he includes I can tell that there is much funnier material he could have added. The timeline jumps back and forth and it gets a bit confusing. As an embedded journalist I expected his insights to look a little deeper rather than telling us what we kind of already knew. Some paragraphs were beautifully composed and the structure was nice despite the timeline as he would begin by introducing the firefight from the first few shots and then cut off to tell the reader about some surveys and theories before continuing the firefight tale.
I know that I am being very critical but I actually did enjoy reading this book and some features of the structure and composure I admired. I simply expected more.
March 3, 2012
Having spent a lot of time interviewing veterans this book really opened my eyes to the connection, dynamics, consequences, and emotional pull and push that war and combat is to a veteran. Junger describes things so well and in a way that only a person who has been through combat can relate but as the reader you almost feel as though you get it, but then again you really can't unless you've been through it. Many a veteran has tried to explain it to me but has been at a loss for words. Junger puts those e-motions, experiences, and mental and emotional chords together in words for those who've been through it and for those of us who have not but need to know what it's all about. This book was not political, not bias, it just proves what we've all seen for centuries as we've read and watched men give their lives for a a cause greater then themselves and for those serving with them. Junger by far is an incredible journalist who risked his life in a way to speak for those boys who served and lived and those who served and died in the Battle Battalion.
October 6, 2017
"Guerra" es el relato de un corresponsal de guerra que convive durante casi año y medio con un pelotón norteamericano en primera línea de combate en la zona más dura de Afganistán. Su propósito no es analizar el por qué de la guerra o cómo se desarrolla, sino entender cómo se vive desde dentro, qué sienten, piensan y experimentan los soldados en primera línea. Y lo hace viviendo con ellos, durmiendo como ellos, comiendo lo mismo que ellos, realizando las mismas marchas y expuesto a los mismos peligros. La única diferencia es que durante esos meses, Junger no portaba un arma, sino una cámara.
¿Consigue Junger su propósito? Supongo que sí. Desde luego, es imposible llegar a comprender qué se siente en esa situación simplemente leyéndolo... pero supongo que nos permite tener un cierto conocimiento de lo que experimentan estos hombres. También nos permite comprender mucho mejor cómo son estas guerras modernas en las que apenas hay un frente, en las que no se enfrentan ejércitos de la forma tradicional, sino que los combates se basan sobre todo en emboscadas y escaramuzas en las que un puñado de combatientes mal alimentados y mal vestidos son capaces de poner en jaque al ejército más poderoso y tecnológicamente sofisticado del mundo. Claro que habría que entender también qué es poner en jaque: porque hoy en día, al contrario de lo que ocurría en las guerras "clásicas", un combate en el que mueren 50 talibanes puede ser un éxito para estos si consiguen matar a un estadounidense y herir a otros dos. Hoy, las guerras son muy raras, aunque igual de absurdas que siempre.
Como digo, el libro supongo que consigue su objetivo. Y lo hace bien, pues además analiza las reacciones y sentimientos de los soldados, echa mano de estudios científicos para explicar las reacciones humanas ante ciertas situaciones, etc. Y, pese a todo, aunque valoro muchas cosas... no me ha entusiasmado el libro.
¿Por qué? Pues... no sabría decirlo con exactitud. Quizás en parte, porque apenas me ha aportado nada nuevo. Quizás ahí el problema sea más bien mío, quizás ya en el fondo conocía más o menos todo lo que cuenta este libro a través de otras lecturas. Sí, eso probablemente ha influido, y quizás me habría impresionado más si hubiera llegado a esta lectura más "virgen" en el tema. Pero además de eso, creo que se alarga demasiado sin añadir gran cosa. Es decir, llega un punto en el que parece que el libro no es más que una sucesión de escaramuzas y tiroteos todos más o menos iguales y con la gente comportándose más o menos igual que en la anterior. Quizás le sobren algunas páginas.
Hay cosas interesantes, por supuesto, incluso muy interesantes, sólo que para mí no eran nuevas: el extraño atractivo de la guerra, el subidón de adrenalina que produce adicción en quienes lo experimentan y hace que, en el fondo, se pasen los ratos de calma ansiando que llegue el próximo enfrentamiento, aunque sepan que pueden morir en él. O el intenso vínculo de camaradería que produce luchar juntos, y que provoca que uno esté realmente dispuesto a morir no por defender una causa que generalmente les importa muy poco, sino por salvar a sus compañeros de armas. El análisis de estos mecanismos psicológicos en el combatiente, y en cómo muchas veces los convierte en incapaces de reinsertarse en una sociedad civil en la que es imposible experimentar esas sensaciones es, probablemente, lo más valioso de este libro. Lástima que para mí no haya resultado una sorpresa, ya sabía de estas cuestiones psicológicas por otras lecturas, así que repito: probablemente el problema sea mío.
En cualquier caso, por supuesto, un magnífico trabajo periodístico.
¿Consigue Junger su propósito? Supongo que sí. Desde luego, es imposible llegar a comprender qué se siente en esa situación simplemente leyéndolo... pero supongo que nos permite tener un cierto conocimiento de lo que experimentan estos hombres. También nos permite comprender mucho mejor cómo son estas guerras modernas en las que apenas hay un frente, en las que no se enfrentan ejércitos de la forma tradicional, sino que los combates se basan sobre todo en emboscadas y escaramuzas en las que un puñado de combatientes mal alimentados y mal vestidos son capaces de poner en jaque al ejército más poderoso y tecnológicamente sofisticado del mundo. Claro que habría que entender también qué es poner en jaque: porque hoy en día, al contrario de lo que ocurría en las guerras "clásicas", un combate en el que mueren 50 talibanes puede ser un éxito para estos si consiguen matar a un estadounidense y herir a otros dos. Hoy, las guerras son muy raras, aunque igual de absurdas que siempre.
Como digo, el libro supongo que consigue su objetivo. Y lo hace bien, pues además analiza las reacciones y sentimientos de los soldados, echa mano de estudios científicos para explicar las reacciones humanas ante ciertas situaciones, etc. Y, pese a todo, aunque valoro muchas cosas... no me ha entusiasmado el libro.
¿Por qué? Pues... no sabría decirlo con exactitud. Quizás en parte, porque apenas me ha aportado nada nuevo. Quizás ahí el problema sea más bien mío, quizás ya en el fondo conocía más o menos todo lo que cuenta este libro a través de otras lecturas. Sí, eso probablemente ha influido, y quizás me habría impresionado más si hubiera llegado a esta lectura más "virgen" en el tema. Pero además de eso, creo que se alarga demasiado sin añadir gran cosa. Es decir, llega un punto en el que parece que el libro no es más que una sucesión de escaramuzas y tiroteos todos más o menos iguales y con la gente comportándose más o menos igual que en la anterior. Quizás le sobren algunas páginas.
Hay cosas interesantes, por supuesto, incluso muy interesantes, sólo que para mí no eran nuevas: el extraño atractivo de la guerra, el subidón de adrenalina que produce adicción en quienes lo experimentan y hace que, en el fondo, se pasen los ratos de calma ansiando que llegue el próximo enfrentamiento, aunque sepan que pueden morir en él. O el intenso vínculo de camaradería que produce luchar juntos, y que provoca que uno esté realmente dispuesto a morir no por defender una causa que generalmente les importa muy poco, sino por salvar a sus compañeros de armas. El análisis de estos mecanismos psicológicos en el combatiente, y en cómo muchas veces los convierte en incapaces de reinsertarse en una sociedad civil en la que es imposible experimentar esas sensaciones es, probablemente, lo más valioso de este libro. Lástima que para mí no haya resultado una sorpresa, ya sabía de estas cuestiones psicológicas por otras lecturas, así que repito: probablemente el problema sea mío.
En cualquier caso, por supuesto, un magnífico trabajo periodístico.
June 13, 2013
War is a lot of things, and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting.
So says Sebastian Junger who decided to shadow an American infantry platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. The 2nd Platoon, Battle Company of the storied 173rd Airborne Brigade, to be exact.
And what a way to view the conflict in Afghanistan.
The reality of combat- the heat, the cold, the fleas, the TARANTULAS, the violence, the primitive conditions, and even the boredom, all make for a compelling read. The absolute commitment these young men have for one another is the real story. This is not a book about the politics of war- but rather an account of what it means to fight, serve, and face mortal danger for extended periods of time.
So says Sebastian Junger who decided to shadow an American infantry platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. The 2nd Platoon, Battle Company of the storied 173rd Airborne Brigade, to be exact.
And what a way to view the conflict in Afghanistan.
The reality of combat- the heat, the cold, the fleas, the TARANTULAS, the violence, the primitive conditions, and even the boredom, all make for a compelling read. The absolute commitment these young men have for one another is the real story. This is not a book about the politics of war- but rather an account of what it means to fight, serve, and face mortal danger for extended periods of time.
December 13, 2019
This book is so much bigger than me. I feel like I understand a few people better now, but I'm probably just imagining it.
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