"The Forever War": Searing descriptions put reader in the picture

"The Forever War"

by Dexter Filkins

Knopf, 384 pp., $25

The first thought on reading this book is how extraordinarily vivid it is. It starts on the first page and hardly lets up. The writing has a kind of video quality. Consider the author's description of Afghan fighters:

"The old men, the leaders, were walking junkyards, metal and bullets and shrapnel, heaped over with holes and scar tissue. They'd walk in on peglegs with ill-fitting plastic arms and when they plunked down in their chairs it was like watching the frame of an old car collapse."

The author of "The Forever War," Dexter Filkins, was a correspondent for The New York Times in Iraq from 2003-06, and earlier was in Afghanistan. The book contains the most memorable scenes of those places, as if to say, "This is what it was like."

Filkins has a magnetic eye for the absurd and the horrifying. He pictures the terrified 21-year-old from Saudi Arabia who joined up with radical Islamists to fight Israel, and finds himself about to be executed by rival Muslims in Afghanistan; the photographer in Iraq who retreats into gunfire to retrieve his $200 Ray-Bans; the doctor in Iraq who announces that his hospital has been reduced to ruin by freedom and democracy. He muses on the peculiar and horrifying fact about suicide bombers: that their bodies are blown to bits but their heads are not.

The reader can see why politicians don't like journalists like Dexter Filkins. Politicians are purpose-driven. They have plans, goals and ideologies, and want to impress upon everyone how important these are. But Filkins has presented no ideology in this book. There is also not much organization — the book is only vaguely chronological, a series of bright and sometimes shocking vignettes of people doing violent, desperate, risky, fearful things. There is insight, such as the conclusion that the violence between factions in Afghanistan is rationed — limited so as not to kill too many fighters — and sometimes ritualistic. But the insight comes in small pieces. If there is any big reason for why Americans are fighting in Asia, Filkins does not look for it and does not see it.

He is in no way anti-American about it. He shows, with obvious admiration, a Marine captain skillfully leading his company on an assault into Fallujah so as to keep the men alive by using tactics that minimize the risk of injury. He shows educated Iraqis, terrified of insurgents who, he writes, "could spot a fine mind or a tender soul wherever it might be, chase it down, and kill it dead." He also presents Iraqis who have had a family member killed, or humiliated, or property destroyed in the war, and who tell him to his face that they wish the Americans in hell.

He shows, too, dissembling and dishonesty. "There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves," he writes. The Iraqis lie to the Americans because the Americans have the power. "Of course they lied," Filkins writes. "But the worst lies were the ones the Americans told themselves."

Not once does this book denounce the war, but that is its effect. It has no dull spots, though the reader may set it aside when he cannot take in any more of it.

Bruce Ramsey is a Seattle Times

editorial writer.