War is the astonishing new book from author, journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger. Expanding on a series of articles published in Vanity Fair in 2008, it documents the 15 months he and British photographer Tim Hetherington spent embedded with the 2nd Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, one of the most hostile and violent combat theatres in the Afghan conflict. Korangal, a place Junger describes as “Afghanistan’s Afghanistan”, is only 6 miles long and yet, such is its geographical importance to the flow of insurgents and weaponry from nearby Pakistan, and so ferocious is local opposition to the US presence there, that forty-two soldiers have lost their lives in the characteristically vicious firefights that erupt with little or no warning. Many more have been wounded. Like the fleas and scorpions and the tarantulas that hide under the rocks, death is a permanent presence in the valley.
As its title suggests, this is a book ostensibly about the war. In truth it is about very much more. Junger judiciously avoids politicizing the conflict or attempting to find crude meaning in America’s presence in this most inhospitable terrain, no doubt aware that true meaning now lies beyond even the most hawkish logic. He doesn’t try to unpick the Korangali way of life, project meaning or unearth specific political principles. Instead he focuses on the men stationed at the front line; men living amongst bullets and mortars and flies and dirt; men who volunteered for combat for many different reasons but who now find themselves inextricably bound by an extraordinary, potent sense of brotherhood.
This specific neutrality enables him to offer a deeper discourse, to explore the personal cost to combatants, the psychological price paid by each and the remarkable effect that isolation, frustration, shards of intense violence and prolonged empty chasms of boredom can have on groups of disparate young men (they are, in the main, heartbreakingly young and they are all men.) Dividing the book into what are essentially three long essays, “Fear”, “Killing” and “Love” Junger breaks down the lives of the soldiers, often into minute detail. From the particular brand of physical and verbal roughhousing that underpins their relationships; the extraordinary acceptance of firefights fought in flip-flops and “gym shorts and unlaced boots, cigarettes hanging out of their lips”; the concentrated rush of adrenaline that precedes enemy attacks and becomes eventually, and incomprehensibly to the reader in the anesthetized shelter of his own life, irreplaceable; the hours spent sitting aimlessly in the heat and dust ruminating and reeking of ammonia (as their fatless bodies burn muscle); and, most tragically, the trauma brought on by the deaths of men with whom they have faced enemy bullets and bombs until luck (and Junger expertly explains quite how important a part luck has to play in front line life, and death) catches up with them.
Certain characters within the platoon stand out – the thrilling, protective Lt. Col Bill Ostlund, Sgt. Brendan O’Bryne, the platoon’s grounded and teak –tough NCO, among many – but for Junger no single part is greater than the whole and ‘The Rock”, as the 2nd battalion is known, is the true protagonist. The extraordinary effect (psychological, social and neurological) that it has on its members is the driving force within the narrative and Junger dissects it up superbly. The love (of a very different kind) that these men have for each other and the loyalty that runs though the platoon’s core, loyalty that sees them aching to return to combat from leave, unable to cope with the triviality of civilian life, and would have them throw themselves onto a hand grenade to save another’s life, is almost incomprehensible to anyone beyond its confines. For these soldiers it is the essence of being human.
War is a gripping book written in a stark, beautiful prose. It is challenging and upsetting and covered in extraordinary detail. Junger risked his life across five tours into Korangal Valley to document the lives of these men who risk their own lives every single day. The result deserves to be read by as wide an audience as possible.
