The Forever War

Vietnam was still fresh when I read Dispatches by Michael Herr. The intimacy and immediacy and apparent formlessness of the book unsettled me, but of course it felt like Vietnam, dark and frightening, shifting and hard to pin down. And now Dexter Filkins has done the same for this too too similar war. I find this even better and more compelling than Dispatches. Is that because I'm thirty years older and know more of the world? Whatever the reason, this is wonderful reporting, painful, brutal and ultimately frustrating as the war it tries to describe.

You know what you're in for when you step into a book about the Iraq war after 9/11 written by a New York Times writer. It's going to be bleak, maybe a bit odd, and it's going to be fair. Filkins's book is all of that but what stands out to me is his deft pacing and striking language. While this could easily have devolved into a series of anecdotes, there are thematic guy wires helping the reader stay on course. There is darkness here. A lot of it. But there's just enough light and humor that the humanity doesn't disappear. There's also an adept sense that neither Filkins himself nor the Iraqis understand the disaster that befell that country in the wake of the US invasion. This book doesn't seek to explain or dissect but tells the show more story of the people involved and how they coped. A wonderful book full of honesty, humanity, and horror. show less

Already, the Iraq War is fading from our memory. 2003 already seems in the distant past, and the withdrawal in 2011 is getting there. Still wrought with civil war, our attention has already shifted to other wars, both present and potential: Iran, Libya, Syria.

This amnesia should be surprising. the Vietnam War—a similar quagmire—traumatized the nation, and led to a suspicion of the military that only started to thaw by the time of Desert Storm. Yet there's one important difference: the draft is gone, and an all-volunteer army increasingly draws from rural and poor youth, all categories nearly invisible in the media. Rather than a shared sacrifice, war is increasingly waged using the unprivileged few.

This forgetting and ignorance, show more which had already started during the occupation itself, means the public isn't so easily soured by war—making books like The Forever War all the more crucial as reminders of just how crazy the times were. Crazy is almost a cruel way to describe the events, as that doesn't capture the very real suffering inflicted on all parties involved, but especially Iraqi civilians. For them there was no withdrawal coming, no salve to the daily reality of trying to balance the hope of collaboration with the sobering knowledge that it would make them a target for violence.

It's apt that the writing style reflects this craziness, a pointillist vision through dozens of discrete events, all adding together to chronicle the deeply dysfunctional occupation. At first, the institutional corruption and the violence are two separate problems. Before long, though, they merge: sectarian militias made official instruments of the state, carrying out civil war under police uniforms.

Filkins' book works because it captures the street-level degeneration, shows how the civilians are pulled between the will of the state and the much more dangerous will of the insurgency—or really, how that dichotomy is false, concealing a much more complex tug-of-war between powers, some clothed in official authority and others not. It's hard to go into much more detail, because in some sense this book is all detail; it resists summary, and therein is its power. Sorry if this sounds like a mess as a result. show less

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Great writing about horrific stuff. First off, let me say Dexter Filkins is one helluva good writer. Secondly, I have to tell you that I could only read this book in small portions, a chapter or two at a time, and then put it aside for a time to digest the horror and near hopelessness of what he was describing about his several years - yes,YEARS - spent reporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During those months and years, Filkins made it a point to get to know the men and officers he worked with and wrote about them, unsentimentally, but still in ways that will break your heart. Here's a brief sample.

"Corporal Nathan Anderson was dead. He was a lanky kid from a small town in Ohio show more who was always taking his buddies' spare change to raise money for his sister's college tuition. Af few days before, after we'd run through machine-gun fire to cross 40th Street, Anderson had braved gunfire to go back and rescue his friends. Anderson's buddies did the same here, charging into the gunfire to get him. He'd died in their arms."

There are so many small stories of lives cut short here, they will make you weep. Cpl Romulo Jiminez, a hot rod fanatic from West Virginia, shot through the spine, dead. Sgt Lonny Wells, who loved to play poker and "knew all the probabilities," killed by gunfire crossing that same 40th Street. Cpl Gentian Marku, an Albanian immigrant who came to the US at 14, shot and killed on Thanksgiving day. I almost had to turn away as I read these short personal histories, but Filkins did his job; he told their stories.

"There wasn't any point in sentimentalizing the kids; they were trained killers, after all. They could hit a guy at five hundred yards or cut his throat from ear-to-ear. And they didn't ask a lot of questions. They had faith and they did what they were told and they killed people ... Out there in Falluja, in the streets, I was happy they were in front of me."

During his time in the wars, Filkins crossed paths with people you've read about in the newspapers - Paul Bremer, the various commanding generals who have come and gone in the two theaters of the "forever war" on terror. He even crossed the border into Iran and sat in on a meeting between Chalabi and Ahmadinejad. He takes you into the maze-like intricacies of intrigue and vengeance that are common in the tribal systems that have held sway in this region for centuries - things that western minds can simply not comprehend. He makes you feel the grime, the sweat, the unrelenting 100-plus degree heat that permeates everything - in Baghdad, Kabul, Kandahar and Ramadi. You will jog with Filkins along the Tigris river where he is pursued by packs of wild dogs and intimidated by Iraqi checkpoint guards - an insanely dangerous routine he can't seem to stop. Filkins put himself in harm's way repeatedly and always managed to narrowly avert capture and death, and not a few times because some young soldier saved him - at great sacrifice. He is still haunted by those times, and wonders if it was worth it, particularly when he is confronted by a woman who has just voted in the first democratic elections in Iraq -

"'I voted in order to prevent my country from being destroyed by its enemies,; she said ... What enemies, I asked ... 'You - you destroyed our country,' Saadi said. 'The Americans, the British. I am sorry to be impolite. But you destroyed ou country and you called it democracy. Democracy,' she said. 'It is just talking.' ... "

Filkins realizes with sadness that East does not meet West, that there is perhaps an uncrossable chasm between the two cultures that can never be bridged. THE FOREVER WAR is fine journalism, a book that should stand beside the works of Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin; a work to be shelved between Herr's Dispatches and O'Brien's The Things They Carried. show less

Magnificent, chilling, and compelling war reporting. Still working my way through, but immensely impressive.

Some days I thought we had broken into a mental institution. One of the old ones, from the nineteenth century, where people were dumped and forgotten. It was like we had pried the doors off and found all these people clutching themselves and burying their heads in the corners and sitting in their own filth. It was useful to think of Iraq this way. It helped your analysis. Murder and torture and sadism: it was part of Iraq. It was in people's brains.

This is a well-written book that sheds a huge amount of light on the Iraq occupation. Dexter Filkins was in-country for five years, and seems to have stayed mostly out of the Green Zone, thanks in no small part to the New York Times, which ran its bureau like a military compound, and hired a small private army. Despite this one imagines it took some degree of courage on the author’s part too, although he would probably frame his “risk-assessment” somewhat differently. Chiefly because of this, but also because of Filkins’ previous time in Afghanistan, it’s an invaluable text for anyone seeking an understanding of that time. I can tell you it is an infinitely superior work to anything written by British civil administrators in show more the CPA; Rory Stewart or Hilary Synnott, conceited British snobs who understood very little of what they saw.

It has unfairly but inevitably drawn comparisons with Herr’s Despatches. Despatches is a seminal but an entirely different work. Herr was present in a war that was saturated with media presence; Filkins in Iraq is a more solitary light. Also, Herr’s work is infused with introspection, and a weird kind of lyrical war-poetry. What Herr saw was not intrinsically important in terms of reportage, what Filkins saw is. There are stories and anecdotes in this book which will open your eyes. While he makes several stylistic nods towards Herr, Filkins has something else to bring to the table. He has more to focus on.

For all this it is still in parts an infuriating book. Filkins sees everything through American eyes, but this isn’t so terrible, because he never pretends not to. He wears his subjectivity on his sleeve. A review of The Forever War in the Herald argued it was refreshing to read a book on Iraq that wasn’t an argument, but there is an argument in this book, latently, or at least a tacit acceptance of the war as something without a moral dimension, as something that just happened, and that probably should have. There is too running through this the implication that the Iraq invasion wasn’t a moral disaster, that Islam has something dark and violent and its heart, that the Americans that fought there were making some kind of positive contribution.

Further, there is the old American insularity. There is far more scorn poured on the Iraqi people than on US soldiers. Political motivations back in Washington, George Bush, Bremer, American attitudes towards the Middle East and foreigners in general, these things aren’t mentioned at all. When, concluding, he talks of those Iraqis and Pakistanis lucky enough to come into the New York Times’ orbit, and thereby later get visas for America, his tone is slightly sickening. As if there was nothing really out there, beyond the borders of the States, no countries or cultures worth living in, nothing really to be built or saved. When he was in Iraq he might as well have been in outer space, he adds. I suspect Filkins’ social alienation post-Iraq is not just the trauma of coming back from a war zone, but also the sign of a huge cognitive dissonance. It will remain so until he figures out an argument he can live with.

As informative and competent as this book is, it’s probably best to accompany it with a more thoughtful analysis. I would recommend Jonathan Steele’s Defeat. show less

Filkins is a foreign correspondent who travelled widely and lived in Afghanistan and Iraq. This book describes his impressions of Afghanistan under the Taliban (from September 1998) through to their overthrow. But the bulk of the book is centred on his years in Iraq, monitoring, analyzing, reporting on events following the US invasion in 2003. Filkins is an astute observer and someone who tried to stay close the Iraqi people and what they were experiencing, rather than retreating into the Green Zone as the security situation grew more and more perilous.

The theme, the odour of violence pervades in both countries, but Filkin strives to see beyond that, to understand, and to see the goodness that does still exist. His description of show more Afghanistan under the Taliban: “The brutality one could witness in the course of a working day was often astonishing, the casualness of it more so; and the way that brutality had seeped into every corner of human life was a thing to behold. And yet somewhere, deep down, a place in the heart stayed tender.” And in Iraq: “Murder and torture and sadism: it was part of Iraq. It was in people’s brains.”

In Iraq, Filkins charts the mismanagement, the missed opportunities of the successful US invasion, the descent into chaos, political infighting, violence, and ethnic cleansing, and the increasing disconnect between two worlds:

“There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves. The one the Iraqis were having with us—that was positive and predictable and boring, and it made the Americans happy because it made them think they were winning. And the Iraqis kept it up because it kept the money flowing, or because it bought them a little peace. The conversation they were having with each other was the one that really mattered of course. That conversation was the chatter of a whole other world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it.”

Barriers to understanding were everywhere: cultural, historical, political, social: “…for many Iraqis, the typical nineteen-year-old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying America’s goodwill; he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance.” And yet, Filkins, who spent a good deal of time in combat with marines, has an abiding respect and caring for these young soldiers, thrown into impossible situations that they cannot fathom, exposed to very real danger and death, in a world where firepower trumps nuance every time to the detriment of relations with Iraqis, but where they will risk their lives for each other and then return home, dead or battered to grieving families in small towns. show less