War and Remembrance

Americans are tired of the war on terror. It's been a while now, and the images on the evening news don't seem to change much. We make progress in one place (Iraq) just as everything seems to fall apart in another (Afghanistan). And people have other things to worry about—like house prices, or their 401(k) plans or who's going to be the next president. Small wonder that media coverage of the war has dropped dramatically.

If you're a journalist who's actually reported on the war, though, chances are you're not buying it. American soldiers are still fighting and dying around the world on the nation's behalf, even if the rest of us sometimes seem more interested in watching "Law & Order" reruns. A few weeks ago, CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, during an appearance on "The Daily Show," indicted her own network's role in promoting the culture of apathy: "When was the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier. What does that look like? Who in America knows what that looks like? Because I know what that looks like, and I feel responsible for the fact that no one else does."

Good point. Many of us feel like we've been inundated by information about the war ever since that day in September 2001 when we couldn't turn off the TV. But maybe it's time to think again. September 11 was also the moment when Bush administration officials admonished us to "think about what we say," and when the networks opted against broadcasting disturbing imagery from the site of the attacks out of respect for viewer sensibilities. Admirable, and yet deeply problematic. The government in Washington later cited similar considerations when it banned news organizations from showing the coffins of our dead soldiers returning at Dover Air Force Base. Our policies have a cost—to our own citizens as well as to the people who happen to live in the countries where we've chosen to fight.

That's why "The Forever War," the new memoir by New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins appears at such an opportune moment. Filkins has seen more of this story than just about any one else around. In the late 1990s he reported from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. In September 2001 he entered the rubble of the World Trade Center just hours after the attacks. From 2003 to 2006 he covered the war in Iraq—including the horrific Battle of Fallujah in 2005, when 6,000 Marines wrested back control of the city from an army of jihadis. (The Marine unit he accompanied lost a quarter of its men.) He has witnessed executions, narrowly escaped abduction and cheated death on numerous occasions. Along the way he has also made some very good friends.

None of which would matter much if it weren't for something else: his extraordinary ability to reproduce the texture of a world inhabited with hollow-eyed fanatics, Skoal-chewing boy warriors, jovial murderers and shattered survivors. "The Forever War," in contrast to many of the works on Iraq and Afghanistan already crowding bookstore shelves, isn't really interested in dissecting policy, or in advancing a particular argument. This is a book in ravenous search of the particular. "The explosion unfolded so close," writes Filkins, "I could discern the intimacies of its sounds, its timbers, the cracks of the tumbling debris, the simultaneity of noise and wave." A Taliban grandee has a "small, constipated smile," while the driver of a fearsome American tank has "a boy's voice, the voice of a child before it changes." Walking through the smoking rubble of a street in lower Manhattan he notices a "gray-green thing spread across the puddles and rocks. Elongated, unrolled, sitting there, unnoticed. An intestine."

No, Filkins is not very circumspect. He refuses to sugar the pill, and I am sure that there are moments when his reporting might offend. To that I can only reply: yes, terrorism is in very bad taste. So, too, is war—even, and always, wars that are fought for good causes. What we tend to forget, in our hedged, cozy American lives, is that there is a kind of redemption to be found in honesty. Filkins is so attentive to the details that we find ourselves, amid the anarchy, rewarded by revelation. Contrast this with the CBS News producer who, according to Lara Logan, turned down one of her reports with the excuse that "one guy in a uniform looks like another." Abstraction is the enemy of truth.

And sometimes, too, is ideology. I can easily imagine that Filkins book will be savaged by critics on both sides of the Red-Blue divide. "Sometimes I envied them their patriotism and their faith, honed out there on the plains of Osawatomie," writes Filkins of the young Marines he's with. "Sometimes I thought they needed to ask more questions." Liberals will hate the first part, conservatives the second. But I think Filkins has the tuning just about right. Along similar lines he offers a wry but surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi émigré politician who, among other things, supplied the Bush administration with dubious alibis for the 2003 invasion and is accordingly demonized by critics of the war (most of whom, unlike Filkins, have never actually met the man). Filkins knows that back story well, but at the same time he can't help but be impressed by the guy's smarts and sheer chutzpah. Elsewhere Filkins brutally juxtaposes the upbeat propaganda of Green Zone cheerleaders with the bloody ground truth he encounters in the country outside. No additional commentary is needed.

Filkins assumes, indeed, that his readers are grown-ups. He's doesn't feel compelled to range his stories on a timeline, opting instead for a cross-cutting technique that jolts us back and forth like Humvee passengers in an ambush. Analysis and context are sometimes dispensed with; he's laconic to a fault. For that, though, you will learn how it smells, sounds, and feels in the thick of the Global War on Terror. However gruesome his subject matter, Filkins's writing is always supple and rich, sharp as razor wire, with a pronounced flair for succinct observation: "From the very beginning, Iraq was an elaborate con game; the Iraqis moving and rearranging the shells, the Americans trying to guess which one had the stone." It may be surprising to hear that there is plenty of humor to be eked from the mayhem. In Afghanistan, when he and his colleague are threatened by Kalashnikov-wielding thugs, Filkins offers his impressive-looking business card to one of their assailants: "The Talib grasped it, looked at it and threw it into the street. I might as well have handed him a starfish." Not to mention a grandiose account of Marines who spend six hours blasting a building apart with every weapon in their arsenal as they try to kill a sniper—only to watch the likely culprit finally pedal away on a bicycle, just out of reach.