Sebastian Junger’s War will be for the Afghanistan war what Michael Herr’s Dispatches was for the Vietnam War. By capturing the unabashed experience of a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, Junger has captured the essence of this war for this generation. He doesn’t debate politics, because the politics of it all mean very little to the men fighting. What matters is their collective survival and doing their job. Junger uses biology, psychology, and military history to put what these men are going through mentally and physically into context.
Junger made five trips into the Korengal Valley over the course of a year. He writes this about the valley:
The Korengal Valley is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off. The Soviets never made it past the mouth of the valley and the Taliban didn’t dare go in there at all.
It is a sparsely populated slit of steep mountainsides and draws near Pakistan, and it was the most dangerous posting in Afghanistan. It is nicknamed the Valley of Death. The U.S. withdrew all troops from the valley a month before Junger’s book was published, stating a shift in strategy in the larger war effort.
Junger follows several men more than others, but he never delves into one soldier’s character completely. They are a collective, and they operate as a whole. He finds that the best fighting men are the worst garrison soldiers. They’re troublemakers. In fact the platoon has a tradition of beating all new members, including officers. They beat guys when they go to and come back from R&R. The only way you can leave without getting beaten is to be wounded or dead. Speaking of being poor garrison soldiers, one soldier states, “Okay, I got to shine my fucking boots. Why do I care about shining my goddamn boots?” But these are the men you want with you in a firefight.
The sheer physical toil of the war is almost unbelievable. The men tote 80 to 100 pound packs up and down steep slopes. The rocks shred their clothes. They carve an outpost out of mountainside in the middle of the night. The outposts are infested with fleas and tarantulas. And not least of all, they receive enemy fire on almost a daily basis. Junger states that the men reek of ammonia because they have burned all the fat from their bodies and are now burning muscle.
The only thing worse than the physicality of the war is the psychological strain. One soldier compares the rush of adrenaline from a firefight to crack, and many of the mean don’t know how they will handle returning to the States. Junger writes:
The attention to detail at a base like Restrepo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences.
Of course the war in Afghanistan has its own peculiarities, but it is still war. It shares what all wars have in common. When one of the men discusses signing back up after his tour despite all of the terror and violence he has experienced, Junger writes:
War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. 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. These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive- that you can get skydiving- but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.
Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington filmed a Sundance award-winning documentary about their experiences with Battle Company in the Korengal Valley. The film is name Restrepo, after the base carved in the mountainside. The base was named after a medic who was killed.
After several years, I re-subscribed to Tin House. I thought it would inspire me to be more diligent in my reading, but I’m afraid it may make me fall farther behind, which is why I unsubscribed the first time. It just makes me feel better about myself to subscribe to a great literary magazine. Sometimes you just need those false and worldly self-esteem boosters. Anyway, here we go. The Winter issue is subtitled “Strong Coffee and a Good Read.” Most issues have a theme, but I think I am correct in saying this issue is theme-less. If I have missed it, please let me know.
You see, in real time the events of the story would probably take five minutes at the most, but Thomas goes on for thirty-seven pages thinking of these things in his head, while the attractive co-worker in front of him pours her coffee. To give you a clue as to Thomas’ mental state, he describes his co-worker breathing as “A soft wall swollen with something almost unbearably luscious underneath. Was that an okay thought to have? Hello soft wall, he wanted to say. I love you.”
