Filkins was in Afghanistan before and after Sept. 11, and in Iraq from the beginning of the American invasion in March 2003, first as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and then for the New York Times. His focus is the human cost of the wars; he isn't out to lambaste U.S. policy or strategy (except implicitly), and so readers anywhere on the political spectrum can respond to his writing.
``The Forever War'' suffers a bit from unshapeliness. A long and affecting opening section on Afghanistan precedes (and has little to do with) the meat of the book, the reporting on the ghastly war in Iraq. Even within these separate sections, the chapters fall together only loosely.
What Filkins has to offer is stories, dozens of them. He's a master of the moment, of the concrete, of texture; where others try to explain, he wants you to know what being there feels like. He fell in love with Afghanistan, and he depicts the drawn-out conflict between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance as a strangely gentle war in which soldiers would blithely switch sides when they sensed a shift in the winds of power: ```Yesterday, my enemy,' one soldier said, `today, my brother.'''
Sweetness and Brutality
Their sweetness didn't prepare him for the brutality he was to come up against in Iraq, and even the severity of his first years there didn't steel him for the full-blown insanity of the civil war:
``Electric drills were a Shiite obsession. When you found a guy with drill marks in his legs, he was almost certainly a Sunni, and he was almost certainly killed by a Shiite. The Sunnis preferred to behead, or to kill themselves while killing others. By and large, the Shiites didn't behead, didn't blow themselves up. The derangements were mutually exclusive.'' The wonder is that Filkins's tone never loses its warmth. He is a war reporter who has finally freed himself from the long shadow of Michael Herr, the reporter who covered the Vietnam War for Esquire and published the now classic ``Dispatches'' in 1977. Herr's voice was so strong -- pitch-black and disgusted -- that it has colored practically all war reporting since then.
Filkins's personality is very different. In his writing you sense a man striving to hold onto his decency in the midst of a slaughter that would drive most of us deep into cynicism. Maybe that's why he can connect with so many of the run-of-the-mill Iraqis who are trying to do the same thing.
Trained Killers
He's even better on the American soldiers. Not that he's soft on them. ``There wasn't any point in sentimentalizing the kids; they were trained killers, after all. They could hit a guy at 500 yards or cut his throat from ear-to-ear. And they didn't ask a lot of questions ... sometimes I wished they asked more questions.''
Filkins asked. He knew how to get people to talk -- and talk and talk. He put his life on the line and came close to losing it often enough that he has a hard time explaining, even to himself, why he stayed.
There were soldiers, too, who went through the worst and then re-upped. Herr wrote about the same phenomenon -- getting hooked on war. It makes sense to me, though I can't explain it, and it probably has something to do with why I couldn't put this book down.