Sebastian Junger’s ‘War’: A year with a platoon in Afghanistan
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From June 2007 to June 2008, Sebastian Junger, author for Vanity Fair mag and best-selling writer of “The Perfect Storm,” travelled fivesome multiplication to easterly Afghanistan to engraft with a platoon of American soldiers occupying a heap outstation in the Korengal Valley. Photojournalist Tim Hetherington sometimes attended Junger, and Vanity Fair promulgated their reports and pictures in 2008. Junger’s coarse-grained and dear new leger, “War,” rewrites and expands upon his Vanity Fair dispatches.
The Korengal is, in Junger’s quarrel, “the Afghanistan of Afghanistan” — an obscure, needy, ferociously freelancer and “inordinately tearing dent in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains.” The soldiers Junger writes astir yield firing nearly alwaysy day, laugh of bushwhack patch on police is ceaseless. Firefights diverge in vividness, from a few tepid shots dismissed by a local villager leased by the Taliban to hassle the Americans to a full-on guerrilla onslaught that threatens to rub out the stallion platoon.
Death can occur at any clip and from any focusing. “Pretty practically e’eryone who died in this vale died when they least expected it,” Junger writes. “The men just ne’er knew, which meant that anything they did was potentially the finish matter they’d e’er do.”
They fight fears and direful nap. And yet for these soldiers — who are so young (many of them are but 19 or 20 years old) and so fantastically well-trained — their fearlessness is well-nigh bey inclusion: The absence of scrap is worsened than battle. Firefights fill their thoughts — with nearly no beast conveniences in their removed outposts, thither is niggling else to recall around — and when attacks ejaculate they nearly joyfully leaping into activeness.
Junger uses the soldiers’ experiences to shortly search respective asides that avail instance their lives on the strawman lines of war. We discover some the discourse of wounds by battle medics, the legion studies through by the Army and others during the preceding respective decades to realise how soldiers role nether ardour, the paste of fraternity — and it is nil less than dearest — that gives scrap units braveness and holds them unitedly, the bell that “the becalm adrenalin of enceinte battle” takes on approximately soldiers.
These asides widen a tale that differently is so tightly focussed that any bigger survey of the war in Afghanistan goes unmentioned. Then again, as Junger writes, “The lesson foundation of the war doesn’t look to involvement soldiers often, and its long-run achiever or loser has a relevancy of near aught \u2026 they broadly parting the big exposure to others.”
A duet of Hetherington’s photographs instance the strawman and cover of the ledger’s jacket. It’s a dishonour more don’t seem inwardly. His fantabulous ferment can be ground by visiting vanityfair.com or restrepothemovie.com, the site for the objective that Junger and Hetherington sustain produced based on their reportage in Afghanistan. “Restrepo” (the rubric refers to the outstation where Junger was embedded, which was named later a scrap trefoil, Pfc. Juan Restrepo, killed in activity) won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival; a histrionics discharge is aforethought for after this year.
Junger’s leger was set too other for him to admit the Army’s secession from the Korengal Valley in April. The military, led in Afghanistan by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, terminated it was a slip to keep the cat-and-mouse standstill that had interpreted grasp in the vale since American forces get-go arrived in 2005, and that the U.S. comportment in the vale had won ended few minds or dull few hearts. It’s unconvincing the fallback surprised Junger. “The fact that networks of extremely peregrine amateurs can confuse — eve overcome — a pro army is the but matter that has prevented empires from totally deciding the trend of story,” he writes. “Whether that is a dear matter or not depends on what amateurs you’re talk astir — or what empires — but it does imply that you can’t auspicate the issue of a war plainly by look at the numbers.”
It’s a passing that brings to psyche “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” Rudyard Kipling’s 1886 poem some the British see on the Afghanistan-Pakistan moulding. In Kipling’s poem, a British officeholder civilised at big disbursal — “two thou pounds of teaching” — apace “drops to a ten-rupee jezail.” Put the American military, with its “harebrained quantity of firepower” (Junger notes how an onset on an Army outstation could end with Apache helicopters, AC-130 gunships, A-10 “Warthogs” or B-1 bombers unloading on a vi insurgents) in billet of the British army, and sub the inexpensive musket pet by Afghan fighters more than a 100 ago with nowadays’s omnipresent AK-47, and it’s indecipherable whether thither’s any commute to Kipling’s maths: “Strike heavy who cares, spud neat who can / The odds are on the cheaper man.”
Where that leaves those of us who aren’t devising the sacrifices our soldiers are uncoerced to micturate or long-suffering the hardships they’re uncoerced to stand is with the province to be thrifty what we ask our soldiers to do, Junger says. “Soldiers themselves are loth to valuate the costs of war \u2026 but person moldiness,” he writes. “That valuation, on-going and double-dyed by government, may be the one matter a nation utterly owes the soldiers who guard its borders.”
Jody Seaborn is the American-Statesman’s books editor. jseaborn@statesman.com; 445-1702
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