The Afghan War: Up close and personal

In my Best of 2010 list, there was one item conspicuously missing: Sebastian Junger's gripping book, "WAR: As Soldiers Really Live It."

My friend Colleen gave me the book last summer and I read it voraciously. While I've read outstanding pieces of reporting about the Afghan War in The New York Times and Esquire by C.J. Chivers, this was by far the best treatment I've seen in book form. In fact, the movie "Restrepo" -- co-directed by Junger with photographer Tim Hetherington -- was based on this book. It played in Portland movie theaters for just a few weeks, but I missed it.  Had I seen it, I imagine the book and film would have landed on my Best of 2010 list. You can bet I'll be ordering it soon on Netflix.

So what was so good about the book?
-- The reporting: It's one thing to debate U.S. policy objectives, as so many pundits do, but another entirely to devote yourself to immersion reporting on the front lines. Starting in the spring of 2007, Junger and Hetherington spent 15 months with a single platoon at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The proximity to those troops resulted in first-hand observations and descriptions of the soldiers' thoughts, fears and actions, both risky and heroic. It's harrowing stuff, reading about the sound of gunfire and the physics of a single bullet's speed and lethality, let alone the hidden dangers of roadside bombs and the punishing climate and mountainous terrain of the Korengal Valley.

Misha Pemble-Belkin, left

-- The writing: Junger, the author of "The Perfect Storm," does a great job describing the hostile environment of Afghanistan, the brotherhood among the troops, and their genuine respect for the enemy (impoverished Taliban fighters who were outnumbered and under-resourced yet gave their American foes all they could handle in a firefight). He also tells the stories of a few individuals, including Oregon's Misha Pemble-Belkin, to paint the larger picture of a platoon made up of unique personalities and backgrounds.

It was a weird irony of the war that once you were here -- or your son was -- the politics of the whole thing became completely irrelevant until very conservative families and very liberal ones -- there were some -- saw almost completely eye to eye. Misha Pemble-Belkin's father was a labor organizer who had protested every American war of the past forty years, yet he and his wife were wildly proud of their son.

Pemble-Belkin wasn't allowed to have toy guns when he was young, even squirt guns, so he and his brother picked up crooked sticks and pretended to shoot those instead. The men of Second Platoon shortened Pemble-Belkin's name to "PB," which inevitably became "Peanut Butter" and then just "Butters."

He spoke slowly and very softly, particularly on the platoon radio, and he played guitar and drew pictures of the valley on a sketch pad. He claimed it was the only thing he knew how to draw. Butters could easily have been an art major in college except that he was a paratrooper in the Korengal Valley. He joined the Army after spending a year living in his car, snowboarding.

-- The insight: Junger is a great conduit for the thoughts and motivations that keep these young men on task, whether coping with the boredom and oppressive heat of a summer day or the adrenalin-fueled sensation of coming under attack from an unseen enemy. In one passage, he overhears one soldier complain to his sergeant about a man in another squad falling out during an uphill climb after a 20-hour operation.

The idea that you're not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you're not prepared to walk for someone you're certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.

Toward the end of the book, Junger writes about war's "all-embracing fog of uncertainty" and how it binds combat troops.

Combat fog obscures your fate -- obscures when and where you might die -- and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time.

The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing.

I don't remember dog-earing as many pages in a book as I did this one. And as I plowed through it, my youngest son, Jordan, was ever-present in my mind. He doesn't talk much about the harshness of training exercises or the camaraderie amongst the troops, nor do I push him to reveal what he'd prefer to keep to himself -- although he and I did talk about the book at one point last year. Still, Junger's book -- like Chivers' newspaper and magazine articles -- added to my understanding of the realities that Jordan might someday face if he is deployed.

He's training with a Stryker Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord and possibly could be deployed sometime in 2012. He hopes to go so he can finally put into practice all that he's learned to do. We get that -- he wants to perform the job he's trained to do. But as parents, Lori and I of course hope that day will never come. With the U.S. presence there pretty much assured until 2014, we'll have to see how things unfold.

Photograph by Tim Hetherington