Sebastian Junger (left) with photographerTim Hetherington in Afghanistan?s Korengal Valley
The title of this powerful work of reporting will make a certain generation think of the lyrics of the 1970 antiwar protest song by the late Edwin Starr:
War … huh … yeah What is it good for? Absolutely nothing …
And yet these lyrics and their Vietnam-era mood could not be further from what Sebastian Junger found in the 15 months he spent on and off "at the tip of the spear" with U.S. combat soldiers in the most dangerous valley in Afghanistan.
Combat, the non-analytical immediate expression of war, fulfills some soldiers so much that they end up loving it. The rest of their lives pale by comparison. Forget about unwilling draftees; this war is being fought by volunteer soldiers who respect their leaders.
I can think of no better book for bewildered parents who find their sons or daughters want to go into the military at combat level, and I have never read a more compelling account of the complex suffering and rewards of the combat experience. Skeptical pacifists, which loosely describes the social level to which I belong, should leave their presuppositions behind and learn a few things.
The working conditions for front-line soldiers are appalling. Infantrymen carry almost everything they need on their backs, and that's a heavy load, as Tim O'Brien let us know in his famous short story, The Things They Carried. In Afghanistan, the load is 100 pounds or more to be hauled in temperatures that reach into the high 40s.
But combat infantry take a perverse pride in the weight they carry and their terrible conditions, eating the worst, sleeping the least and dying the fastest. They are the real soldiers, typically poor in garrison situations but excellent in a fight.
Junger was embedded with the second platoon of Battle Company, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, in the Korengal Valley, a transit corridor for Taliban fighters coming into Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Americans controlled only part of the valley, sometimes engaging the Taliban in as many as 13 firefights a day. Soldiers were in danger even in their bases: Snipers shot the men while they were urinating or lying asleep in their cots.
Out on patrol, Junger's Humvee was blown up by an IED and he and the others survived only because the bomber misjudged the explosion by 10 feet. Junger earned his cred by doing everything short of handling a weapon. But he makes no attempt to come across as a regular guy. He knows the results of studies on soldiers' reaction times, on heroism and on fear, and he understands the contradictions in the military experience.
Junger focuses on a soldier named O'Byrne because he is more articulate than many of the others, but no less tough. He was a teenage brawler and drunk who was shot twice by his father and ended up in detention, but turned his life around and went into the army, purposefully seeking out a dangerous combat position.
This seeking out of danger is perplexing to civilians. I know that in the training leading up to Canadian deployments in Afghanistan, poor soldiers are punished by being refused the opportunity to deploy. In other words, volunteer soldiers do not try to get out of combat. They try to get into it.
Combat soldiers do not typically exhibit fear in a firefight. Fear expresses itself in anticipation or after the fact in dreams and a state called "anxious rumination," in which soldiers imagine what could have happened. This line of fretting leads to trauma and, indeed, psychiatric casualties of war can be as high as physical casualties.
Junger is an advocate for combat soldiers, and he is particularly good in taking us into their heads. Although he tells us nothing we didn't know before about the combat experience, he tells it in a manner that is fresh and convincing: The group dynamic among them is very powerful; men will die for their friends and know their friends will die for them. This intense bonding is a form of love much stronger than almost anything these men will feel again.
The combat infantryman is perfectly suited for combat, but not much else. The army does not teach life skills, and Junger says one of the most traumatic effects of combat is having to give it up. Veterans miss a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted and standards are pure and clean, whereas civilian life feels purposeless and decadent with all the decisions being made by the wrong people.
Since Junger focuses so closely on soldiers in their combat experience, he leaves many things out, among them the dread of those who wait behind for their loved ones to finish their tours of duty. While there is something very strong in the appeal of battle for soldiers, there is little appeal for those who love them except relief upon their successful return or a lifetime of grief upon hearing the bad news.
To say Junger is a good writer would be an understatement. He has already proved himself by writing the much-praised A Perfect Storm. Anyone suffering from a little reality hunger could do worse than to read Junger's new book. It's a moving study of the soldier under stress, and while it doesn't exalt war, neither does it settle for pious generalizations, either pro or con. Junger wants you to understand combat, and short of joining up, this is as close as you will come to doing that.
Antanas Sileika's son is a Black Watch reservist who was deployed in Afghanistan in 2009. During that time, every morning, he scanned the top and the bottom of his street with dread, hoping not to see a pair of military men ready to bring bad news.