Aegis 2010
106
Book Review >>> Justin McAtee
The Forever War Filkins, Dexter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. 384 pp.
Ramey
The Forever War, from New York Times foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins, is an intimate examination of human resilience, told from ground-level by a man who sought to understand the traumas of a culture not his own. Told with the honesty and emotive power of a high-zoom lens, the book reads like a series of snapshots taken from a painfully perceptive pair of eyes. Filkins spent nine years embedded in Afghanistan and Iraq, living amongst the voices which fill his account. Their stories come alive in writing that is heartfelt and viscerally unflinching. But The Forever War is much more than a collection of second-hand accounts; Filkins truly surrenders himself to the cultural and emotional landscapes that he seeks to understand, and the reader can feel the burden in his voice. His writing is as much autobiographical as it is journalistic, and this fusion of the self with the subject is what makes The Forever War a remarkable book. It transcends the traditional “big picture” concerns of journalism and instead becomes a catalogue of human details. The wide-angled, historical narrative—that which is most conventionally journalistic—while certainly not the distinguishing quality of the book, is still a central component in Filkins’ message. Like any journalist, he strives to inform the public of a conflict that is usually discussed in broad, generalized terms. And while he occasionally speaks in these terms, elucidating, from time to time, the historical and political motions behind the events, his primary mode of informing is not to mimic the work of other reporters. Filkins’ work is unique because he is concerned primarily with showing us the conflict from the ground level, in full detail and for an extended stay. The book proceeds with alarming immediacy and closeness. He leads us through the streets of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, years before the American invasion, taking us into derelict soccer stadiums where captive viewers are forced to watch public executions. After a brief return home to Ground Zero 9/11, we return to a new war and are guided from safe-house to bunker to mountain battlefield, meeting leaders and lieutenants from every side of the conflict. We learn of the country’s destitute and chaotic past, how from amongst the competing warlords the Taliban rose to offer stability and order (along with tyranny and fear) and why, therefore, some Afghans were willing to accept a united country even if it meant a unification under terror. We learn how in Iraq, like Afghanistan, brutal sectarian conflicts gave rise to a single, authoritarian stability. For many unstable years, sheiks had rallied militias against each other, grappling for control. Out of this maelstrom arose Saddam Hussein, a national hero for many Sunnis and whose 2003 ousting caused a widespread resentment toward Americans, even from the majority who disliked Saddam anyway. The problem for Iraqis was that the toppling
