"Hooh!... Yeah!... What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHIN'!! Say it again..."
This was another book that you picked up at Book People and couldn't put back down. you really enjoy it when that happens. It's like love at first sight, but with books.
Sebastian Junger is most well known for writing the book "The Perfect Storm." He is a freelance journalist who also directed a documentary called Restrepo which he made with cameraman, Tim Heatherington. You'd seen the film before buying the book, but had no idea when you bought "War" that it was about Junger's experience during the year long filming of "Restrepo." (Incidentally, Tim Heatherington was killed a few years later while covering the revolution in Libya. His death inspired an exodus of almost all Western journalists. C.J. Chivers, who wrote "The Gun", couldn't stand the thought that Tim's death would result in a media blackout of a war zone, so he returned to Libya immediately to continue the work his friend had died doing.)
One of the things that attracted you to this book as you read it in the store was how raw and honest the writing was. Junger makes no attempt to speak to the overarching themes of the war in Afghanistan and only briefly touches on any grand strategic concepts. Instead, he focuses on how the human animal responds to being in combat, actual physiological stuff. He explains how far away a bullet would have to be fired from for human reflexes to allow someone to dodge it (much farther than any of the combat he described in the book). He describes in intimate detail the privations and the physical hardships and the boredom of being in a war zone. He explains the chemical responses within our brains when we are exposed to the extraordinary experience of 21st century battle. But mostly, he explores the psychological effects of being in close combat for extended periods of time.
Most of the book takes place in a lonely outpost called Restrepo. Named after a fallen trooper, OP Restrepo is manned by soldiers from Battle Company of Second Platoon, 173 Airborne Brigade. The outpost is in the middle of a remote valley on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border carved out of the Hindu Kush mountains by the Korengal River. At the mouth of the valley the United States Army had recently established a base called the KOP (Korengal Outpost). The KOP is surrounded by some of the highest mountains imaginable (the foothills of the Himilayas, really) and as such was exposed to weapons fire from Taliban forces who could simply climb the mountains, aim downwards, and hit anything they wanted inside the base. Sometime in mid 2007, Battle Company, attempting to deny the enemy this opportunity, climbed the walls of the valley in the middle of the night, and built an outpost on the site from which they had been taking the most incoming fire.
For days as they built OP Restrepo, the men would dig in and try to build, only to be forced to stop and fight off repeated enemy attacks. Sometimes they would have five or six or seven battles in a day. Immediately after each firefight, they would lower their weapons and grab their shovels and pick axes and get right back to work. The outpost is so high in altitude that footage of mortar rounds exploding nearby show the smoke flowing down the mountain sides... down! Restrepo was so remote that it had no electricity no running water and no hot meals. But, as awful a place as the outpost was, it did its job. And so did the troopers living there for fifteen months. The KOP was never attacked directly after the OP was built. Other bases in neighboring valleys were not so lucky in 2007-08.
The men and boys of in this book were in almost constant combat for fifteen months. The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944 were only in combat for eleven months before Germany surrendered. The war in Afghanistan is the longest war the United States has ever fought. As noted in a previous review, the British have fought four or five wars in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union went bankrupt partly as a result of trying to conquer this country. And it is worth noting that the reason these Central Asian people (who have only been Muslim for a hundred years now) are noted for having blonde and red hair is because Afghanistan is the place where Alexander the Great's armies had to stop in their conquest of the known world. Alexander's soldiers stayed in valleys like the Korengal for so long, trying to conquer, that their European genes are still affecting the features of the people who live there today. Afghanistan is the place where empires go to die.
Indeed, the descriptions of the area are reminiscent of Dante's "Inferno." Restrepo is infested with fleas and giant spiders the size of your hand who seek out human body heat. Wolves prowl outside the walls and mountain lions are known to stalk inside the walls, while tribes of monkeys scream at the setting sun. There are even birds whose calls sound exactly like incoming RPG rounds. Why anyone would want to fight over this piece of ground is beyond you, but fight there they do, and fight there they have for thousands of years.
Junger's descriptions of the combat at Restrepo was pretty memorable. His explanation for the rules of modern combat in a world of machine guns and air power gives lie to the idea that war is supposed to be honorable, "...it's not. It's about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men."
But Junger can't deny how extraordinarily exciting the experience is, "In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn't where you might die... It's where you find out if you get to keep on living."
He reminded you that soldiers don't just fear death. "As a soldier, the thing that you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. cowardice lingered forever." And he reminded you just how ludicrous warfare between an ancient and undeveloped people and the world's only Super Power can be. "Each Javelin (a shoulder fired, anti-tank missile) costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable."
But what stood out more than Junger's wit or his journalistic gift of keen observation was how much he ended up caring for the men at Restrepo, and how much those relationships made you care for all of the soldiers still fighting for a cause and in a country that most Americans have forgotten. Half way through "War," in a section about killing and the true cost of war, he wrote what might be the most memorable quote of the whole book. "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."
The clarity Junger brings to the clouded subject of war left you with questions. Those young men (and now women) he's talking about were his friends. They are your countrymen. Some of them are or soon will be your family. What is our society still asking them to do in Afghanistan? Is it worth it?
One thing this book didn't offer was easy answers.
On to the next book!
P.S. While you were reading this book, Simon Kilingert (another war correspondent) posted a link to a 360 panorama of Forward Operating Base Munoz. FOB Munoz is in Pakhtia Province, to the south of OP Restrepo. You kept coming back to this site to get a feel for how the war must look for the men and women who are fighting it.
Here is FOB Munoz in 360 panorama.
Here is more info about FOB Munoz.
Unlike Restrepo, which was always within sight of supporting bases, FOB Munoz could only be reached by air units for resupply or reinforcement. It seems that each different corner of the War in Afghanistan offers its own special flavor of Hell.
P.P.S. This is a fascinating speech given by Junger about how veterans could possibly miss an experience as terrible as war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGZMSmcuiXM
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