No Worse Enemy

February 6, 2012
Following five years of an embedded media assignment with the British Army and U.S. Marines, Anderson, a journalist and documentarian (The Battle for Marjah), covers the front lines in Afghanistan. With interviews from military commanders, and Afghan and allied soldiers, he witnesses a surge in arms, men, envoys, and policies upon each return to the battlefield, but nothing seems to halt the rising death toll, terror in the villages, and pushback from a determined enemy. When the vigilant British troops hand the fighting over to the American military units in that region, they have suffered large losses in lives and equipment, leading Anderson to write: “Roger Moore was charming but the fighting was spiraling out of control, and John Wayne, Ted Nugent, and Ice-T had been sent to finish things off.” The Yanks, despite major firepower and more soldiers, do not fare much better, and gone is the talk of liberation, replaced by goals of stifling the Taliban and denying al-Qaeda a haven. Similar to Michael Herr’s high-octane Vietnam War classic, Dispatches, Anderson delivers a gritty, brutal, realistic account of British and American troops on the Afghan frontlines in a bitter counterpoint to all the policy concessions and peace chatter.