War (the book)

I'm a third of the way through, and I'm hugely impressed. Sebastian Junger became an instant best-seller with The Perfect Storm. Now he's done it again with War. Apart from the rather odd dust-cover photographs, it's a masterful and convincing account of men in combat--in this case, at a fire base in "a small but extraordinarily violent slit in the foothills of the Hindu Kush" mountains of Afghanistan.

It's curious but true that the best accounts of the Afghan war have been written by journalists, not soldiers, though there have been plenty of combat memoirs. (Mostly by officers. Perhaps that's the problem? Mr. Junger concentrates on the grunts, not their commanders.) My previous favorite was The Only Thing Worth Dying For. Mr. Junger's may be the better book, because he was present for much of the action he describes; he didn't write it from interviews after the fact, as Mr. Blehm did with his great account of the Special Forces team that went into the 'Stan in November 2001, when the war was green and everything possible. Check it out at Amazon. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford