WAR, Sebastian Junger (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, $34.99)

Thirteen years and a middling film adaptation later, it’s still hard to read journalist Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm without coming away awed. A bruising, often terrifying account of life and death at sea, it put Junger on the map as a purveyor of adventure non-fiction, but proved a hard act to follow. Despite its follow-up Fire – a collection of hair-rasing adventure reportage from wildfires, whale hunts and conflict zones – and a foray into true crime (2006’s A Death in Belmont), it’s been a long time between drinks for those awaiting another full-length epic on the scale of The Perfect Storm.

Finally however it’s arrived, and it’s difficult to imagine Junger finding a more brutal example of life at the extremes of human endurance. War is the result of a year spent reporting from the isolated Korengal Valley, ‘Afghanistan’s Afghanistan’, where Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington were ‘embedded’ for up to a month at a time with an American platoon attempting to hold the mountain valley against a strengthening insurgency. The Korengal was renowned as one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan – isolated, rife with fighters, and almost impossibly rugged and mountainous. Everything, even the terrain of the valley, seems inherently hostile right from the start of War – there’s a gradual sense, as with The Perfect Storm, of dire forces assembling themselves.

A broad three-part structure underpins the book, upon which Junger hangs the lofty goal of conveying the actual experience of combat – overcoming the terror of battle, coming to terms with the need to kill, and experiencing the genuine love for platoon-mates that makes the heroism of combat possible. Junger has done a decent amount of research on combat psychology and military history to fine-tune his insights, but the core of War is his own photo-vivid observations of the daily boredom and occasional pure terror of army life in the Korengal. Junger’s spare, evocative writing is on form, and the key events themselves are astonishing: several ambushes, a catastrophic attack on a newly established base, and a bomb attack on a convoy – the last of which ranks as probably the most heart-stopping set piece of the entire book.

Junger’s soldier protectors are sensitively portrayed, ordinary young men who’ve been shaped under incredible strains and stress. The politics of the war barely comes into the equation; for these men, the group is all. The smallest things become crucial, from staying hydrated and keeping bootlaces tied to getting rid of any ration-pack Charms candies (superstition has it that eating them brings on a firefight). Those firefights are terrifying but addictive, and to the soldier, guns are “the point, the only entirely good thing of the whole shitty year” – Junger admits that even as a non-combatant journalist the weaponry got steadily more alluring, to the point where he’d muse over the kind of situation where he’d really need to pick up a rifle. ‘Not killing, necessarily… but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing else you’d rather do’. It’s hardly surprising then that the soldiers who Junger encounters back in civilian life find the transition such an ordeal.

Trying to authentically reproduce any lived experience through writing is a near-impossible task, let alone one with the intensity of warfare, but if no writer may ever truly get there, Junger comes astoundingly close, at least as far as a non-combatant will ever know. The extraordinary impact of this book isn’t just through the recounting of constant toil and danger – painstakingly vivid though this is – but through Junger’s convincing portrait of the fears, actions and emotions of men who will readily die to keep their friends alive another day. That’s the core of this gripping book, unquestionably the best Junger has written since The Perfect Storm, and which will probably remain the standout first-person account of the American war in Afghanistan, if not a classic of war writing full stop. Read it, let it sink in, and be thankful that this is likely as close to the Korengal as you’ll get.

5/5 Stars

~ Review by Sam Finnemore