Scan barcode
slowreeder's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
archcon's review
adventurous
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: War and Violence
Moderate: Alcohol, Death, Gun violence, and Mental illness
dkhunt's review
5.0
Brilliantly and honestly written first-person account of the intense combat in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan as the author embedded with Battle Company over the course of their fifteen month deployment. The sheer amount of firepower and resources used by these 150 men as they try to hold a tiny strip of land hemmed in by mountains on the border with Pakistan is stunning - that they make it through firefight after firefight shooting thousands of rounds, sometimes melting the barrels of the guns they use - it seems impossible that the casualties on both sides remain so low. Those casualties, however, both physical and mental, are rendered in this account with tragic clarity.
The depiction is reminiscent of Ernie Pyle's accounts of World War II Allied combatants from "Brave Men" (as is his involvement and dedication the fighters themselves), Junger also leans on decades of research (much of it begun during World War II) about the psychology of battle. While fascinating to compare of the two depictions of men and their situations - one on a very grand scale with a highly organized standard military enemy and a clear goal, the other confined to a narrow 6-mile long valley against a guerrilla force in a seemingly endless push-pull for control, this account stands on its own as a wonderfully told, heart-breaking account of the effects of war on the men who fight on the front lines. The men grapple with the awareness of how the war is affecting not only their bodies but their minds, yet unable to prevent the inevitable psychological result. A wonderful read.
The depiction is reminiscent of Ernie Pyle's accounts of World War II Allied combatants from "Brave Men" (as is his involvement and dedication the fighters themselves), Junger also leans on decades of research (much of it begun during World War II) about the psychology of battle. While fascinating to compare of the two depictions of men and their situations - one on a very grand scale with a highly organized standard military enemy and a clear goal, the other confined to a narrow 6-mile long valley against a guerrilla force in a seemingly endless push-pull for control, this account stands on its own as a wonderfully told, heart-breaking account of the effects of war on the men who fight on the front lines. The men grapple with the awareness of how the war is affecting not only their bodies but their minds, yet unable to prevent the inevitable psychological result. A wonderful read.
iangreenleaf's review
4.0
I'm not sure that the expansive title of "War" is really the right choice for this book, as its scope is so tightly focused that never comes close to painting a full picture of the war in Afghanistan, much less of war as a general concept. It's a bit odd to get such a intimate portrait of the American soldiers stationed in the Korengal valley while so little time is spent on the enemy that we hardly even know who they are or why they are fighting. Even the allied Afghani forces are nearly invisible in this account, and their occasional entry into the narrative is more jarring for the realization that they've been fighting (and dying) alongside the Americans this whole time, unacknowledged.
That said, this intentional myopia probably makes for a better book. It's a riveting account of what life is like for an infantry soldier in modern warfare, and even more interestingly, of how war makes soldiers think and feel. It's a rare author who can do equal justice to describing the sound of a bullet passing by your head, and the troubled psyche of a teenager taught to kill and stuck in a combat outpost isolated from normal society. If the book has any claim to universal insight about war, it's probably in this thoughtful account of how war changes the people who fight in it.
That said, this intentional myopia probably makes for a better book. It's a riveting account of what life is like for an infantry soldier in modern warfare, and even more interestingly, of how war makes soldiers think and feel. It's a rare author who can do equal justice to describing the sound of a bullet passing by your head, and the troubled psyche of a teenager taught to kill and stuck in a combat outpost isolated from normal society. If the book has any claim to universal insight about war, it's probably in this thoughtful account of how war changes the people who fight in it.
matth's review
dark
emotional
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Engrossing. A glimpse into war and what it does to people.
bookishdea's review
2.0
I don't know, the book was well written, and I plan on seeing the documentary, but there was something about this book that I couldn't quite get into.
sgtbigg's review
4.0
Junger spent five months embedded with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan’s Korengal valley and he does an outstanding job of relating the events that took place. This book is similar to many of the current crop of Afghanistan and Iraq memoirs except for two things. First, Junger is a writer. No matter how well a soldier writes, he is probably not a seasoned writer, which gives this book a different feel. Second, while Junger is with the troops, he is not one of them; this gives him a very different perspective. He comments on this while discussing why he never carried a weapon, “It would make you a combatant rather than an observer, and you’d lose the right to comment on the war later with any kind of objectivity.” WAR is really about more then the events in one valley in Afghanistan. Junger explores why men fight and why men grow to enjoy it. Once again, I find myself bothered by what we ask our young men to do.
ghotisticks's review
5.0
Occasionally a well-meaning person will ask me “what was it like in the Marines?” In an expansive mood, I’ll usually ramble something about toxic masculinity, the 95:5 ratio of tedium to adrenaline, or the petty tyranny of bureaucracy. But this book (and Generation Kill) are the truest voices of my experiences in sum. The soldiers in WAR - including the journalist author - endured or inflicted orders of magnitude more trauma than I experienced, but their motivations, bonds, aggression, and coping methods are rawly universal. What follows is mostly favorite quotes, to minimize the same misplaced and insufficient rambling I’ve done about my own experiences.
It was worth reading if only for its colorful summaries of combat psychology:
“The idea that you’re not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but 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.”
“Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered ‘bravery.’ Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward. There’s no other place to go.”
“What the Army sociologists…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.”
"[Afghanistan is] where the men feel not most alive – that you can get skydiving – but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t. So here sits Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne, one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up.”
“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”
“Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.”
But the book’s real substance lies in Junger’s unsparing and minute documentation of the men he was embedded with. The peculiarities of in-group/out-group dynamics of young men in a lethal environment are uniquely intense (and some of my fondest memories).
“The guys are experts, of a sort, at being funny, and they seem to go out of their way to be. Maybe it’s the only way to stay sane up there. Not because of the combat – you’re never saner than when your survival is in question – but because of the unbelievable, screaming boredom.”
“…if you deprive men of the company of women for too long, and then turn off the steady adrenaline drip of heavy combat, it may not turn sexual, but it’s certainly going to turn weird.”
“The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. That is why the men say such impossibly vulgar things about each other’s sisters and mothers. It’s one more way to prove nothing can break the bond between them…"
“Not all the humor involved gutting your friend’s personal dignity. Donoho would pretend to see obstacles on night patrols and climb over them so he could watch the next guy in line try to do the same thing. Money ate a two-pound bag of tuna in one sitting just to see what would happen. O’Byrne and Sergeant Al fashioned a tarantula out of pipe cleaners to slip in my sleeping bag.”
The book is much more substantial than the above quotes, but those, for better and worse, made my memories vivid in his retelling. This helped me deeply remember why I enlisted, and why I left.
It was worth reading if only for its colorful summaries of combat psychology:
“The idea that you’re not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but 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.”
“Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered ‘bravery.’ Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward. There’s no other place to go.”
“What the Army sociologists…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.”
"[Afghanistan is] where the men feel not most alive – that you can get skydiving – but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t. So here sits Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne, one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up.”
“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”
“Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.”
But the book’s real substance lies in Junger’s unsparing and minute documentation of the men he was embedded with. The peculiarities of in-group/out-group dynamics of young men in a lethal environment are uniquely intense (and some of my fondest memories).
“The guys are experts, of a sort, at being funny, and they seem to go out of their way to be. Maybe it’s the only way to stay sane up there. Not because of the combat – you’re never saner than when your survival is in question – but because of the unbelievable, screaming boredom.”
“…if you deprive men of the company of women for too long, and then turn off the steady adrenaline drip of heavy combat, it may not turn sexual, but it’s certainly going to turn weird.”
“The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. That is why the men say such impossibly vulgar things about each other’s sisters and mothers. It’s one more way to prove nothing can break the bond between them…"
“Not all the humor involved gutting your friend’s personal dignity. Donoho would pretend to see obstacles on night patrols and climb over them so he could watch the next guy in line try to do the same thing. Money ate a two-pound bag of tuna in one sitting just to see what would happen. O’Byrne and Sergeant Al fashioned a tarantula out of pipe cleaners to slip in my sleeping bag.”
The book is much more substantial than the above quotes, but those, for better and worse, made my memories vivid in his retelling. This helped me deeply remember why I enlisted, and why I left.