WAR

Starred review from March 15, 2010
War is insanely exciting.... Don't underestimate the power of that revelation,” warns bestselling author and Vanity Fair
contributing editor Junger (The Perfect Storm
). The war in Afghanistan contains brutal trauma but also transcendent purpose in this riveting combat narrative. Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit. Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.

March 15, 2010
The latest flexing of journalistic muscle from Vanity Fair contributor Junger (A Death in Belmont, 2006, etc.).

The author dives into the most perilous form of immersion journalism, attempting to create an unflinching account of frontline combat. The prototype of this approach is Michael Herr's peerless Dispatches (1977), a thoroughly unsentimental, grunt-level view of the Vietnam War's bloodiest years. Yet if Junger's dispatches from the fighting in Afghanistan solidify anything, it's that war American-style hasn't evolved much in the decades since Herr's book. It seems that neither advanced tactics nor postmillennial weapons technology have negated the all-too-human imperfections of face-to-face ground combat. From June 2007 to June 2008, Junger was embedded—"entirely dependent on the U.S. military for food, shelter, security, and transportation"—with the 173rd Airborne, a seasoned outfit assigned to secure the notoriously untamable Korengal Valley in Afghanistan—murderous terrain that the Soviets had found impassable 30 years before. The author singled out Sgt. Brendan O'Byrne as his primary focal point for the book. O'Byrne's no-nonsense attitude and bleak upbringing—he was shot by his own father in civilian life—seemed most representative of the squad as a whole. As in The Perfect Storm (1997), Junger blends popular science, psychology and history with a breathlessly paced narrative. What's absent here is not only a significant political angle but also any big-picture questioning of what exactly these soldiers are fighting and dying for. Junger portrays the infantryman's life as one dominated solely by the most primitive group loyalty. It's this love for one's brothers-in-arms, the author concludes, that allows the soldiers to stir up the courage and selflessness necessary to function at optimum levels under fire.

An often harrowing, though mostly conventional, account of the physical and psychological toll of modern warfare on the average soldier.

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Starred review from April 15, 2010
Embedded as a journalist in an infantry platoon of the U.S. 2d Batallion, Junger here tracks the unit's 15-month deployment at a desolate mountain outpost in eastern Afghanistan in 200708. Fighting is on foot, over rugged terrain, in a series of patrols and chaotic firefights interspersed with interminable periods of boredom. In a change from his earlier books (e.g., "The Perfect Storm; A Death in Belmont"), Junger here is an observer of the now, not simply a reporter of the past. Trying to capture in words the elements of combat, fear, and ennui through the eyes of the soldiers, he communicates with a level of objectivity that the soldiers cannot. Junger is there, in the moment, with them, but he can also of course pull back and give distance and perspective. Junger's work here is reminiscent of David Finkel's "The Good Soldiers" and Tim O'Brien's fictional "The Things They Carried", yet his work is neither simple hands-on reportage nor a work of fiction. VERDICT Although ostensibly about combat in Afghanistan, "War" examines the raw, brutal reality of combatperiodand why men fight. More than anything else, soldiers fight for one another, and Junger paints them as humans, as heroes, as brothers. Highly recommendednot simply for those interested in military history but for all readers concerned with the human condition. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 2/1/10.]Leslie Lewis, Duquesne Univ. Lib., Pittsburgh

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2010
Over the course of a year, Junger (The Perfect Storm, 1997) embedded himself with Second Platoon, Battle Company, operating out of the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, an inhospitable terrain inhabited by people inhospitable to American forces, where some of the heaviest combat has been fought. Junger took five trips to the valley in 2007 and 2008 to follow Second Platoon through much of their 15-month deployment. He experiences combat firsthand; witnesses firefights, ambushes, and casualties; and survives an IED that blew up the Humvee he was riding in. Second Platoon, considered the best-trained and . . . worst-disciplined, is known for their brawling as much as for their bravery. Junger examines the mind-set of the soldiers who exist on the tip of the spear, the nearly superhuman traits they embody, the challenges they face when they engage with the enemy and interact with locals, the boredom between battles, and the difficulties they have when they return to civilian life. For these young men, war, although costly, is an opportunity to truly live life to its fullest (and carry and fire weapons); the thrill of war by far trumps fear and sorrow and the drudgeries of civilian life. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers; in combat, everything is important and nothing is taken for granted, where men dont feel the most alive . . . but the most utilized. While with Second Platoon, Junger, along with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, took hours of videotape, some of which became part of a feature-length documentary called Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize this year at Sundance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)