Review. War

War
By Sebastian Junger
Twelve 2010, 304 pp.

From the first page, Sebastian Junger's War immerses the reader into the world of the soldiers in what has been dubbed “the most dangerous place on the planet” by President H.W. Bush: Afghanistan's Korengal Valley.

Fear, the first section of the book, establishes the necessary groundwork about the soldiers' thoughts on fighting an armed conflict and their emotions before and during battle. “Combat jammed so much adrenaline through your system that fear was rarely an issue; far more indicative of real courage was how you felt before the big operations, when the implications of losing your life really had a chance to sink in.”

Killing, in part two, explores the fundamental reason why soldiers kill and their reactions when that action is committed on one of their own. When Clinard, an infantryman, sees his commander lying lifeless at the top of a hill, he “stays bent double as if he's just finished a race and moans... in his strangle animal way”.

The final portion of the book, Love, is the most profound and chilling sections in the book. Like Junger so adroitly puts it: “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.”

If you want an ideological book full of military strategies, condemnations of political incompetence, and pundit-bashing; indeed, go elsewhere. This book is for those who want to understand the life of these warriors.

Joseph Suh is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist