WAR

read the book is soooo good

Sebastian Junger has been able to bridge the gap between what we know, and what our husbands don't want to tell us to either spare us the worry or to keep that part of their world separate from the home life. 'War' answers questions that I was afraid to ask, and not only goes in depth to describe what the day to day was like for our boys, but Sebastian seems to understand and explains (very well, in my opinion) the psychological toll of what the men see and do while deployed, as well as the aftermath when they return to Italy. 'War' is an emotional journey for this wife, finding it hard to continue at some points, having to return later after that familiar feeling of dread fades, even though I already know what's going to happen during that particular firefight. The gut-wrentching realism is what it is supposed to be: truth.

I will preface this review by stating that I have experienced combat in Iraq and been in multiple engagements with enemy fighters. War is simply well written and gets right to the heart of the matter regarding combat. If you have no combat experience, you will understand it some after you read this book. Junger manages to capture in words what Soldiers feel and live. I have been back from Iraq for just over a year now and this book took me back and the memories were not bad. He was right and it is difficult to say that you miss depending on the man next to you for survival and having that man depend on you. A lot of books pick up major themes and ideas well but War also captures the minute details that give the reader the most accurate picture on warfighting that I have seen to date. I highly recommend this book and can say with confidence that you will not want to put it down until the last word is gone. Thank you Junger for honoring the Soldiers who represent the best of America.

There aren't many books that really tell the reader what it means to be in battle. Those that have been there don't feel comfortable trying to explain it to those that haven't. As more than one combat veteran has told me, "you just wouldn't understand." Most reporters, even those embedded in a war, haven't really experienced what it means to bean active participant in battle- trying to kill someone before he kills you. There are some very good books about what it's like to be in the middle of a war, like Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place; Fall was a French reporter who was there at the siege of Dien Bien Phu. But even though Fall could describe what it felt like to survive the incessant shelling and attack on the base, he wasn't a combatant. He was still a reporter, an observer. Sebastian Junger is a writer of rare skill who can paint a frighteningly real picture of places few of us would ever think of going. His first book, The Perfect Storm, gave readers a taste of what it would be like to be on a doomed fishing boat in the North Atlantic, at from home, at the mercy of the sea. In War, he takes the reader to an Army outpost in Afghanistan, where Junger and filmmaker Tim Hetherington spent five months over the course of a year and a half with a platoon of young soldiers, fighting a war that we've all read about, but that few of us can imagine. This isn't the tourist war reporting we're used to, where the embedded reporter rides along at the rear of an armored column; Junger puts himself in a situation where he runs all the risks of the soldiers he's reporting on, including getting blown up by an IED that is detonated under the Humvee he's riding in. He manages to survive only because the Taliban soldier triggering the bomb pushed the button a fraction of a second too soon, and the blast is absorbed by the engine rather than the men riding in the Humvee. We're with Junger- and the soldiers of the platoon- as they go on a night time patrol, walk into an ambush, and fight off an assault that nearly overruns their little camp. Junger does not moralize on the war itself; as he explains, to do so would distance him from the men he's writing about, who aren't terribly concerned with politics or the geopolitics of the war. They're concerned with only one thing- survival- which means killing the man out there before he kills you. Isolated in mountainous terrain, with air support a good hour away, the men of Second Platoon, Battle Company, have to rely entirely on one another. Each man knows that every other man in his platoon will (and often do) die for him- otherwise there's no way they could survive where they are. War is full of stories of what seem like astounding heroism in the face of deadly fire- but what are to then men of the platoon, simply what they do. As one solider puts it, going out there to this lonely outpost is what takes bravery; everything after that is just doing your job. Junger goes into some detail asking the questi