It’s been days since I finished tearing through WAR, the new book by Sebastian Junger, and I still still can’t figure out what makes it so good.
A few things stick out.
The setting is both extreme and unique — a tiny primitive American outpost in eastern Afghanistan where a handful of very young men engage in almost 20 percent of the US military’s combat in Afghanistan. Junger spent months living with the soldiers there over the course of more than a year. War is an intimate portrait of these men, men you can’t help but love a little bit and mourn a little bit when they’re killed, as several are.
Junger is not making an argument or defending a policy thesis. He’s describing, and describing well, what it’s like to be a young warrior in an extremely dangerous place, with little attention to a bigger picture. His observations are sharp and never showy:
War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things that anyone engaging in war will ever know. […] It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of….
Junger is pretty famous as the author of The Perfect Storm, but I’d never before read a word of his writing. He’s restrained, more restrained than I can imagine myself being if I had the giant metric tons of material he brought home from the Korengal Valley. War feels honest, and every sentence seems to mean exactly what it says and nothing more.
After he’s nearly killed by a roadside bomb while riding the back of a Humvee, Junger becomes a temporary hostage to the What-Ifs of war (and of misadventure). The bomber triggered the blast just a moment prematurely and the IED went off under the vehicle’s engine block instead of under the cabin (that is, under Junger himself).
“The relationship between him and me couldn’t be clearer,” Junger writes of the bomber, “and if I’d somehow had a chance to kill him before he touched the wires together I’m sure I would have. As a civilian, that’s not a pretty thought to have in your head. That’s not a thought that just sits there quietly and reassures you about things.”
It’s the random nature of death and survival that gets to him, and that gets to the soldiers as well.
The only way to calm your nerves in that environment was to marvel at the insane amount of firepower available to the Americans and hope that that changed the equation somehow. They have a huge shoulder-fired rocket called a Javelin, for example, that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin 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.
The descriptions are detailed but not overloaded. The filthy soldiers live for weeks at a time without hot food or running water. “Dirt collects in the creases of the skin and shows up as strange webs at the the corners of the eyes and their lifelines run black and unmistakable across the palms of their hands.”
The book has 268 pages and didn’t drag at all until 245, which is pretty good for nonfiction. In addition to the grunt’s eye view and his own, Junger wants to get at why men behave as they do in combat, why they hang together, why they die for each other. His survey of research into GIs, fighter pilots and apes is interesting, but more than a page of it got me yearning for the Restrepo outpost.
For all that I’ve said I still haven’t gotten at what makes this book so good. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read something this strong.