Afghanistan a perfect storm for the worst of modern warfare

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Sebastian Junger recounts a dramatic, sometimes funny, story of U.S. troops fighting in the ‘Afghanistan of Afghanistan’. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

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War
By Sebastian Junger
HarperCollins, 384 pages, $27

 "WAR is hell," William Tecumseh Sherman declared. He was never in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, but had he been, he surely would have had his feelings affirmed.

Sebastian Junger, best known for A Perfect Storm, his vivid telling of the massive storm that hit the Eastern seaboard in 1991, spent a good deal of 2007 and 2008 embedded with American troops in eastern Afghanistan for Vanity Fair magazine.

There, in the Korengal Valley, he and photojournalist Tim Hetherington worked on a documentary, called Restrepo, which depicted the harrowing daily routine of U.S. infantry soldiers fighting in what has been called the "Afghanistan of Afghanistan:" the worst of a very dangerous place. That film has won several awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for best film at Sundance 2010.

While filmmaking, Junger worked on this book, which turns out to be riveting. It follows the lives, and deaths, of the men of Second Platoon, Battle Company of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division.

Second Platoon was the "tip of the spear" of the U.S. war in Afghanistan at the Korengal outpost, named Restrepo after the platoon's medic who was killed in a firefight there.

The Korengal was called the "Valley of Death" by U.S. soldiers. More than 40 died there between 2006 and 2010, and hundreds were wounded.

In its time, the Korengal Valley saw more active fighting than any other part of Afghanistan, making it the most dangerous posting for anyone in the U.S. military. Soldiers came to hate the place. "Damn the Valley," or DTV, was a short-hand reference for everything that went wrong for the U.S. troops there.

Junger writes exceptionally well, maintaining an apolitical and balanced perspective while engaging his readers with the men of the platoon. They are mostly in their 20s, fighting shadowy and unidentified members of the Taliban who regularly attack the outpost and troop patrols.

Canadian readers may find parallels between Junger's account and Christie Blatchford's excellent Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction in 2008.

Both books provide an up-close view of modern soldiers fighting in a gruelling and intractable conflict.

War is often explained and understood in terms of its physical terrain: the territory won or lost, contested boundaries and the theatre of battle.

Junger is mostly concerned with the human terrain, however; the human interest that is inevitably tied up in those who do most of the living and dying in the name of national interests.

He wanted to know what it was like to serve in a platoon of combat soldiers in the U.S. army. The terrain is not healthy: half of the company was on psychiatric medication by the end of their tour, and their day-to-day routine was survival.

The physical circumstances that the troops endured during their tour were appalling. Unbearable heat, no water, flea infestations and almost daily firefights with insurgents. In 2007, every patrol in the valley resulted in a firefight.

As Junger writes, the moral basis for the war in Afghanistan is largely irrelevant to the soldiers. Long-term success or failure is of zero interest to them. Rather, they're concerned with getting through every day without death or injury. And they do so mostly by relying completely on their fellow troops.

This is perhaps the best part of the book, Junger's keen sense of the honour among these men, their dedication to one another, and their willingness to sacrifice their own lives to save another.

Junger notes that most of these young men have gone straight from living with their parents to training for war, then fighting one. But his account of this human terrain shows that they know what they're facing in Afghanistan, and what damage the war has done to them personally.

Funny at times, Junger's story is dramatic. It's also a heartbreaking read, as so many of the men who appear in the book are killed, or injured. Most of them leave Restrepo with some psychological wounds.

As with any account of war, Junger uses a lot of the military lingo common among the soldiers. For the most part he does a good job of translating for his readers, though there are times his glossary is welcome.

Sherman was a general officer for the Union side during the U.S. Civil War, so his experience and reflections might appear antiquated or irrelevant with respect to the war in Afghanistan.

But there may be comparisons between the two that go beyond the hell of war. As Junger suggests, this current war has sucked up resources, both human and treasure, and has developed a logic of its own.

Neither side, he argues, can afford to walk away. And while the U.S. hasn't walked away from the Afghanistan war, it has from the Korengal. The U.S. military closed that outpost in April 2010.

George A. MacLean is professor and head of political studies and a research fellow at the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba. He spent time with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan in 2004 when they were in Kabul.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 29, 2010 H10