BOOK REVIEW--"WAR" BY SEBASTIAN JUNGER

Reviewed by Bill Breakstone, September 20, 2010


Sebastian Junger is a journalist who writes for Vanity Fair and is the New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont. His current book, War, was published in July of 2010, and a film, Restrepo, which was shot while Junger and his associate, photojournalist Tim Hetherington, as a companion piece to the book, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

War is an account of the 15-month tour of duty that Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade, U.S. Army spent in the Korengal Valley in the foothills of the Hindu Kush of eastern Afghanistan. It is a riveting tale of men at war and the truths of combat: the fear, the honor, and the trust among fighting men. The reader gets an intimate picture of the life of a professional soldier—how they live; how they feel about combat and the ever- threatening risk of mortal warfare; the physical demands placed upon them by the harsh environment—the heat of summer and the freezing cold of winter in the mountains; the sounds of gunfire; and the agony of loss.

Junger avoids for the most part a politicalzation of the conflict, but he does give a first-hand glimpse of what our military leaders, in this case the Company and Battalion Commanders, objectives were and also an insight into the methods employed by the Taliban and the attitudes of both the village elders and their subjects, which are often in conflict with each other.

THE ENVIRONMENT
The Korengal River Valley runs to the southwest from its confluence with the Pech River and its valley in the north. It is an extremely rugged, mountainous terrain, sparsely inhabited with only a few primitive roads. The southern parts of the valley are almost totally controlled by the Taliban; the central valley was contested by U.S. forces and was the scene of perhaps the most brutal combat engagements in all of Afghanistan; the northern valley and the Pech River Valley were far safer and the scene of only intermittent skirmishes, with one exception. In the summer of 2008, 9 American soldiers were killed and 27 wounded when the Taliban overran an outpost near Camp Blessing on the Pech, in what to this date was the single costliest firefight of the war. The more southerly contested area of the Korengal was a two-day convoy trip from the nearest re-supply base in Asadabad, which in turn was 50 miles from the largest nearby city, Jalalabad. From there, it was another 75 miles to the Bagram Airbase near Kabul. Thus re-supplying the various outposts and firebases in the Korengal Valley was a complicated affair.

THE COUNTERINSURGENCY STRATEGY
The Allied Forces success in Iraq was keyed when the local population started cooperating with our forces and “turned tail” on the insurgents. [That success is tentative and only time will tell how secure the Country will be in the long term.]

What our strategy in Afghanistan is trying to accomplish is similar, but the two countries are far different in many ways. For one, the terrain is far more demanding, in many cases, almost impossible to secure. The Korengal Valley is situated no more than 15 miles from the Pakistani border. Taliban fighters and supplies filter back and forth from neighboring sanctuaries across the border with near immunity. Without the cooperation of the local populace, rooting out the Taliban involves bloody fighting. The enemy recruits local boys and young men, paying them $5.00 a day, to ambush and kill the Americans.

One American operation described by the author sought to move troops into villages where Taliban arm caches were suspected to be, thus depriving the enemy of its hidden supplies. One of those villages was Yaka Chine, the southernmost village in the valley before one enters territory totally dominated by the insurgents. Air strikes were called in on a house where insurgents were observed by a surveillance drone taking cover. In the process, five civilians were killed. American commanders knew that apologies were due the village elders and their subjects if any further cooperation would be possible. They were offered by Bravo Company commander Captain Dan Kearney, to little effect. Here’s an excerpt from the book that illustrates how difficult a task we face; the speaker is the Brigade Commander, Lt. Col. Bill Ostlund, addressing the elders after Captain Kearney’s speech:

“We came here with a charter from the U.S. government with direction from the Afghan government and the Afghan national security forces,” he says. The translator delivers the sentence in Pashto and then stops and looks over. “And we were asked to bring progress to every corner of Afghanistan. Somehow miscreants have convinced some of your population that we want to come here and challenge Islam and desecrate mosques and oppress Afghan people. All of those are lies. Our country supports all religions.

The translator catches up. None of the expressions [on the faces of the elders and villagers] changes.

All of my officers are trained and educated enough that they could teach at a university,” Ostlund goes on. “I challenge you elders to put them to work; put them to work building your country, fixing your valley. That’s what they’re supposed to do—that’s what I want them to do—but they can’t until you help us with security.

The translator is good; he delivers Ostlund’s points with nuance and feeling and looks around at the old men like he’s delivering a sermon. They stare back unmoved. They’ve seen the Soviets and they’ve seen the Taliban, and no one has made it in Yaka Chine [a small village up Valley] more than a day or two. The name means “cool waterfall,” and it’s truly a lovely place where you’re never far from the gurgle of water or the quiet shade of the oak trees, but it’s no place for empires.

You can be poisoned by miscreants and they can tell you that America is bad, that the government’s bad, but I ask you this: what have the people who run around with this stuff”—Ostlund waves a hand at the weapons—done for your families? Have they provided you with an education? Have they provided you with a hospital? I don’t think so. I would say, shame on you, if you follow foreign leaders that leave their beautiful homes in Pakistan and come here and talk you into fighting against your own country, and they do nothing for you.

The ACM [Anti-Coalition Militia—essentially the Taliban] that comes in and gives you five dollars to carry this stuff around the mountains and tells you you’re doing a jihad, is doin’ nothing for you except making you a slave for five dollars. These foreigners won’t fight my soldiers; they hide on a mountain in a cave under a rock and talk on the radio and pay your sons a small amount of money to go ahead and shoot at my soldiers. And my soldiers end up killing your sons.

It’s a good speech and delivered with the force of conviction. That night a dozen or so fighters are spotted moving toward Captain Kearney’s position on Divpat, and an unmanned drone fires a Hellfire missile at them. They scatter, but the Apaches won’t finish them off because they can’t determine with certainty that the men are carrying weapons. The Americans fly out of Yaka Chine, and the valley elders meet among themselves to decide what to do. Five people are dead in Yaka Chine, along with ten wounded, and the elders declare jihad against every American in the valley.”

That’s what our forces and their commanders are up against. But they keep trying. They keep building those schools and hospitals and improving village services, in hope that sooner or later the population will realize who are their friends and who are their real enemies.

During Battle Company’s deployment to the Korengal Valley, the spring, summer and fall of 2007 saw the most intense period of combat. Insurgent attacks occurred on almost a daily basis. With the onset of winter in late 2007, the frequency of contacts with the enemy abated, eventually slowing in the spring of 2008 to a period when weeks would go by without any engagements. This lack of activity was not unusual in the harsh winter environment, but something else was going on, as Junger relates:

“In January [2008], Prophet [Army monitor of enemy communications traffic] overheard two Taliban commanders discussing the American presence in the valley by radio. One of them was making the point that if the Americans were willing to build roads and clinics in the valley, maybe they shouldn’t be attacked. The other guy didn’t quite agree, but at least someone was asking the question. The number of firefights in the battalion area of operation had dropped from five a day to one a day, the number of shuras with local leaders had quadrupled, and the Americans hadn’t been shot at from inside a village in the Kornegal since the end of October. That was an important gauge of local sentiment because it meant that the villagers were telling the fighters to take their insurgency elsewhere. There was even a story going around that one of the valley elders had slapped a Taliban commander across the face for refusing to leave the area, and the commander didn’t dare retaliate. The human terrain in the Pech and the Kornegal was changing so fast that Colonel Ostlund felt confident a little more development money would allow NATO forces and the Afghan government to absolutely ‘overrun’ the area. ‘The arguments I’ve heard against the American presence here are all economically based,’ he told me. ‘Which is good news, because economic arguments are arguments we can win.’ “

SOCIETAL OBLIGATIONS—SENDING MEN TO WAR
As stated at the beginning of this review, “War” is not only about the battles that took place in the Korengal and Pech Valleys. More interestingly, it is about the combat infantrymen who participated, often at great human costs, and about what makes them what they are.

Before delving into these assessments, Junger makes a crucial point about their utilization:

“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, communications with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that the men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. Society can give its young men almost any job and they’ll figure out how to do it. They’ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. In a very 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 owes the soldiers who defend its borders.”



THE COMBAT SOLDIER’S MOTIVATION
The final part of Junger’s book looks in detail into the minds of effective combat infantrymen. Why do they do what they do? What is courage? What bands these brothers together? This is the most emotional part of the tale. A few excerpts are illustrative:

“Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like profanity. And yet throughout history, men like Mac and Rice and O’Byrne [three members of Second Platoon and close friends with the author] 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 and all the wrong people in power. These men come home and quickly find themselves getting berated by a rear-base major who’s never seen combat or arguing with their girlfriend about some domestic issue they don’t even understand. When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at—you’d have to be deranged—it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.

It’s such a pure, clean standard that men can completely remake themselves in war. You could be anything back home—shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular—and it won’t matter because it’s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore, of no consequence, period. The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. . . . . . For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly.”

Further on, Junger writes:

“Combat fog obscures your fate—obscures when and where you might die—and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. 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 with 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 a person profoundly.”

SUMMING UP
Any intelligent reader can tell from the above excerpts that Sebastian Junger is a terrific writer—insightful, concise, frank, to the point, all with a wonderful way with words. War is a riveting story, but one which has profound meaning as well for what war is all about, what a deadly serious affair it is. It’s one thing to read newspaper accounts of conflicts, or to glance at the casualty reports that appear regularly. One shakes the head and says “how tragic.” But here are the real people, up close and personal. In their own words, feelings unmasked, the daily drudgery of life in a forward operating base or remote outpost, where even a twenty yard trip to the latrine may result in being shot or killed. It makes the reader damn proud of what these you men are doing, and as quoted above, how important it is that our leaders and our citizens think hard before committing them to battle.