The Fighters

October 1, 2017

Senior writer for the New York Times and a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine, Chivers won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for the story on which this book is based. Here, he offers a you-are-there view of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 11, 2001, accompanying soldiers as they go on air strikes, face sniper attacks, engage in counterguerrilla warfare, and hunt down Osama bin Laden. Some fighters are tracked over many years and multiple tours to give the long view on our longest wars. Note that Chivers served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Marine Corps in the Persian Gulf War, so he knows his stuff.

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Starred review from May 1, 2018
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and former Marine Corps infantry officer Chivers (The Gun, 2010, etc.) offers a chilling account of failed American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq through the searing experiences of six fighters.After 9/11, the author risked his personal safety to experience combat up close as a journalist in Afghanistan and Iraq, making excellent use of the observational powers he honed as a Marine during the earlier Persian Gulf War. Chivers ably relates the details of the U.S. military incursions into those two countries based on the thinking of the six combatants featured in the narrative. Each of the men is at the center of at least two chapters out of 13, including the epilogue. By returning to individual sagas throughout the book, the author captures not only isolated moments, but also evolving thoughts as U.S. military and civilian commanders make countless mistakes in their goals and their tactics. One of the six main characters is dead; the other five suffered physical and/or psychological injuries during their service. Now no longer in combat, the protagonists were candid with Chivers about the worth of their military missions. Sometimes bitterness emerged, but more often puzzlement, as the combatants tried to work through why they and their fellow troops were fighting elusive enemies for no clear purpose. At the beginning of each chapter, the author, who shatters much conventional wisdom about the conflicts, provides a transitional summary of shifting U.S. priorities between fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan or sometimes both at once. A central dilemma for noncombatant policymakers has been deciding whether to withdraw, thus creating geographical regions for the terrorists to consolidate, or remain, thus encouraging new terrorist recruits to enlist against the hated Americans.Given his background, Chivers certainly did not set out to write a book emphasizing the foolishness of American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that is the story that emerged from his painstaking, courageous reporting, and readers will be thankful for his work.

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Starred review from May 21, 2018
Chivers, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist and a Gulf War veteran in the Marines, presents in evocative detail the Iraq and Afghanistan war experiences of a handful of American fighters to tell the bigger story of how those conflicts with al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and ISIS devolved into “wars that ran far past the pursuit of justice and ultimately did not succeed.” Chivers focuses on six combatants—an F-14 pilot, a Green Beret sergeant, a Navy corpsman, a helicopter pilot, an Army infantryman, and a Marine lieutenant. He briefly relates why each one joined the military and what happened to them after coming home, but the heart of the book is in-depth, intense reporting of their in-the-trenches tours of duty. Chivers spent countless hours on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013. His reporting rings chillingly true, especially his accounts of the worst that war metes out to those doing the fighting and civilians caught in the crosshairs, for example the agony that corpsman Dustin Kirby went through after being shot in the face. The five-page account of a 2013 meeting between George W. Bush and the severely wounded Kirby and his family is a brilliantly told jolt of postwar reality. This fast-paced, action-heavy work of long-form war journalism has bestseller written all over it. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners.