The Forever War: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER Paperback – 2 June 2009

The book was crumpled a bit and it red mark drawn over the bottom, usually a sign that it's second hand. Bit of a letdown.

Filkins gets right in there (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and you get right in there with him. The narrative is a bit jumpy (time/place/characters) but the result is fabulous nonetheless. Wilkins has an eye for detail, a head for the grand sweep of history, and a healthy dose of self-deprecation so that he isn't afraid to let you know he is struggling and imperfect but doing his best to cover a disaster. And boy, is it a disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I was mesmerized by this book. I was horrified by this book. Dexter Filkins ground level accounts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq bring a visceral immediacy to what is going on over there. The book does not task the reasons we are there. It examines the impact this chaos and slaughter has on the lives of the people who still live there and the U.S. soldiers prosecuting this fiasco.The Shia and the Sunni factions of Islam have fallen on each other like rabid dogs. They don’t just seek to murder each other. That would be far too prosaic. They prefer new forms of torture -the electric drill being one of their favorites. As the author says in one of his quotes, “It’s in their DNA.” And into this hell are injected American forces to help promote “democracy” – a democracy that will transform this region into a fourth century caliph.The neocons that got us into this war are not stupid. There is veniality in their thinking and an absence of reality. It is great theory. I have read most of their works. It is hard to imagine that thinkers like Francis Fukuyama did not grasp how horrific the enterprise he was promoting would become. As a country we became victims of our own arrogance. We got caught in the riptide of history at a time when our political leadership was both villainous and vain. And into that mix there was this ideology, this doctrine that did not want to deal with facts but which had the clarity of a prophecy. It folded in so nicely with the rapture and the end of times. It worked as the final struggle between good and evil. In so many ways those who produced this hell are no different than their counterparts in Taliban.A new culture has been imposed on us. We have broken our sword because the only blow we could strike was against the ancient rock of hatred. Our soldiers are randomly mutilated by suicide bombers and road side bombs. This book brings to mind something Tim Welsh told me about his experience in Viet Nam. “When you have to build a 360 degree perimeter you have lost the war”.The following is part of a review from the New Times Book ReivewNow, in the tradition of “Dispatches,” with the publication of Dexter Filkins’s stunning book, “The Forever War,” it seems the journals of the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures, the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.It is not facetious to speak of work like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the “culture” of a war. The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing started serves us well. You might call the work of enlightening and guiding a deliberately misguided public during its time of need a cultural necessity. The work Filkins accomplishes in “The Forever War” is one of the most effective antitoxins that the writing profession has produced to counter the administration’s fascinating contemporary public relations tactic. The political leadership’s method has been the dissemination of facts reversed 180 degrees toward the quadrant of lies, hitherto a magic bullet in their never-ending crusade to accomplish everything from stealing elections to starting ideological wars. Filkins uses the truth as observed firsthand to detail an arid, hopeless policy in an unpromising part of the world. His writing is one of the scant good things to come out of the war.The old adage holds that every army fights the previous war, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, as someone said of the restored Bourbon dynasty in France. The United States military did learn one strategy for preventing the public relations disasters of Vietnam, and this was the embedding of correspondents with military units engaged. Michael Herr in Vietnam could not have been more alienated from the United States government’s P.R. handouts, but his sharing the fortunes of American troops made his compassion, sometimes his plain love, for them available to thoughtful Americans. It’s hard to imagine that Donald Rumsfeld’s politically intimidated brass had “Dispatches” in mind when they decided to embed correspondents with American units, but it started out as an effective policy. One of the memorable bites of the early days of the Iraq invasion was the exultant embedded correspondent citing Churchill on camera: “There’s nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and missed!” A far cry indeed from being shot at and hit.All that worked for a while. Filkins opens “The Forever War” with a prologue describing the attack on the Sunni fortress of Falluja by the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. Embedded (and how) with Bravo Company, Filkins shares the deadly risks of street fighting in a hostile city in which the company, commanded by an outstanding officer, takes its objective and also a harrowing number of casu¬alties. The description makes us understand quite vividly how we didn’t want to be there and also makes ever so comprehensible the decision by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to give our last excursion into Asia a pass. (“Bring ’em on!” said the president famously about this one.)Filkins had been covering the Muslim world for years before the invasion of Iraq, and his book proper opens with a scene beyond the grimmest fiction, a display of Shariah religious justice staged in a soccer stadium in Kabul during the late ’90s. Miscreants are variously mutilated and killed before a traumatized audience that includes a hysterical crowd of starveling war orphans whose brutalized, maimed futures in an endlessly war-ravaged country can be imagined.For the reviewer — perhaps for the selfish reason that it takes place closer to home — the most dreadfully memorable witness that Filkins bears takes place not half a world away but in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. Filkins is making his way past Battery Park.“My eyes went to a gray-green thing spread across the puddles and rocks. Elongated, unrolled, sitting there, unnoticed. An intestine. It kind of jumped out at me, presented itself. It’s amazing how the eyes do that, go right to the human flesh, spot it amid the heaviest camouflage of rubble and dirt and glass.”In Tel Aviv, Filkins recalls, he watched Orthodox Jewish volunteers seeking out the same sort of item in the aftermath of a suicide bomb.Filkins takes shelter from the cool night in the Brooks Brothers store in One Liberty Plaza.“Later that night,” he writes, “I was awoken many times, usually by the police. Once when I came to, a group of police officers were trying on cashmere topcoats and turning as they looked in the mirror. There was lots of laughter. ‘Nice,’ one of them said, looking at his reflection, big smile on his face. ‘Look at that.’ ”Dexter Filkins, one of The New York Times’s most talented reporters, employs a fine journalistic restraint, by which I mean he does not force irony or paradox but leaves that process to the reader. Nor does he speculate on what he does not see. These are worthy attributes, and whether their roots are in journalistic discipline or not they serve this unforgettable narrative superbly.Someone, Chesterton it may have been, identified the sense of paradox with spirituality. Though Filkins does not rejoice in paradoxes, he never seems to miss one either, and the result is a haunting spiritual witness that will make this volume a part of this awful war’s history. He entitles his section on Manhattan “Third World,” and he leaves us feeling that the history he has set down here will not necessarily feature in our distant cultural recollections but may rather be history — the thing itself — come for us at last.

Having read this book about 1 year ago, and having had time to reflect on what I read, I would have no trouble recommending The Forever War to anyone interested in gaining an understanding of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. First, a bit about me: I largely stay away from books I find to be politically motivated or biased. I'm not interested in hearing the "right wing" or "left wing" perspectives on conflicts. Rather, I look to gain an understanding of the conflict as a whole based on factual reporting from people who were there. In seeking out a wide variety of credible sources, suspending his own judgments, and through first-rate investigative reporting, Dexter Filkins achieves what few other journalists have and tells the story of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are. (As opposed to as interest groups, the media, or others would like to portray the conflicts).Filkins' is uniquely qualified to report on Iraq and Afghanistan, having been a field reporter on the ground, living in both countries. He is a man who has spent time traveling with American troops, speaking to the Iraqi people, and with the Afghan people as well. The Forever War is a collection of his experiences, told as stories, and committed to print. Regardless of your political views or your views on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I would encourage you to read this book if you are looking for a fascinating, first-hand perspective on the wars, as told by an author who seeks first to understand, and then to be understood. 5/5

Comparisons between this book and Michael Herr's 'Dispatches' are inevitable as they both share the same snapshot story format. The word 'dispatches' also features in 'The Forever War's' subtitle - which I suspect is no coincidence. As I considered Herr's book to be one of finest books on war ever written and I was keen to read this 21st century version.'The Forever War' is mostly about Afghanistan and Iraq after the American led invasions, but there are sections prior to that. It's written in a very unbiased manner leaving the reader to draw there own conclusions from the stories involving US troops, insurgents, civilians, politicians and war profiteers. The style of writing is very matter of fact, but rarely dry or dull and never it romanticises war in the way that Herr's book occasionally could. It does an excellent job of showing just how complex the situation in middle east and Iraq in particular really is, however the book points no fingers of blame and is neither anti-war or pro-war in tone.I would recommend this book to anyone really, whether you agree with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or not. Regardless of your viewpoint reading 'The Forever War' will give all but the most blinkered readers something to think about.

In September 1998, the journalist Dexter Filkins took his seat in a Kabul sports stadium to document a spectacle few Westerners witnessed. Filkins did not witness a soccer or cricket match but rather a Taliban-sanctioned amputation and revenge-killing.Before the world learned of the Taliban, Filkins traversed South Asia learning about the force of militant Islam and then later chronicled the Iraq War as the New York Times Baghdad bureau chief. Published in 2009, Filkins’ The Forever Wars captures his detailed report and superb prose. It remains a modern classic of war reporting on the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The fall of Kabul in August 2021 placed a haunting coda on the GWOT, and reexamining Filkins’s work remains relevant for the quality of its writing and reporting.From documenting the Taliban’s violence in Kabul during the 1990s to the reporting in lower Manhattan as the Twin Towers smoldering to recanting the solemn transfer of the remains of an American service member, Filkins’s The Forever War remains a touchstone in the swelling GWOT canon.The Forever Wars closest analog is Michael Herr’s arresting classic of the Vietnam War, Dispatches. Both Herr and Filkins’ strength in their reporting and writing is not the facts of the conflicts but the way they convey their distinct tone, tenor, feeling, sounds, and emotion. Reading The Forever War’s series of set pieces creates a haunting sense in the reader. Like Herr, Filkins' deft employment of sleep as a motif leaves the reader with a spectral sense. Both Herr and Filkins's scenes and subjects are stark and unsettling. Unlike many books on Iraq and Afghanistan that take a more expansive view of the conflict to draw broad conclusions, Filkins crowds his subjects, mainly U.S. servicemembers and Iraqi Security Forces, into frame.The Forever War harkens back to an era before social media, when war reporting at major newspapers shaped the world's understanding of the conflict, post-conflict, and developing world. Filkins' words appeared in print, vice a tweet. Print allowed a delay from observation to publication, allowing Filkins's to tone and sharpen his prose and insights. With the distance between action and transmutation evaporated by the smartphone, all participants in modern conflict have a hand in shaping how the world perceives conflict. The flood of videos, memes, and tweets from the Russo-Ukrainian War does not benefit from the narrative distance Filkins’s took full advantage of.In the final pages of The Forever War, Filkins likens himself to Laika, the Soviet dog who first orbited the Earth. Much like Laika, Filkins sent dispatches back to an interested, yet largely detached, public. The separation and estrangement from America resulted with Filkins's immersion into the conflicts, proving his insights in Iraq and Afghanistan while fragmenting his mind and lowering his horizons. Following the embeds, Filkins describes how the war "flattened" his life, leaving his life in America "silent and slow and heavy and dead." The toll exacted on combatants and correspondence during the wars extended to Filkins himself. He writes, “I fared better than many of the people I wrote about in this book; yet even so, over the course of the events depicted here, I lost the person I cared for most. The war didn't get her; it got me.” Disclosing his personal loss after hundreds of pages of documenting the lives of others strikes the readers as honest and heartfelt.The episodic structure of The Forever War gives the reader a sense of the disjointed, diffused, and disorienting nature of the GWOT. Due to its length and scope, the GWOT took on a different meaning for combatants. For instance, the March Up to Baghdad in 2003 and the fight in Sadr City in 2008 were two very different experiences. However, each battle and campaign of the GWOT leaves the combatants and civilians with a haunted feeling as if the violence undertaken would result in lasting change. Often the battles and campaigns did not achieve lasting peace, vexing those on the front line with a ticket home and those who lived through the madness with no way to go.The Forever War remains a stunning achievement of war reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. Filkins's sharp prose and distinct characters remain vibrant over a decade after its initial publication. In August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban once again. Not far from the stadium where Filkins documents the Taliban's swift brutality, the Taliban installed its emirate a second time. Filkins continues to write on the Middle East for the New Yorker, liberated from the tyranny of the daily newspaper deadline. Re-reading The Forever War shows Filkins’s considerable talent and courage, complete with its repeated exposure to the psychological and physical demands. The GWOT ended, but The Forever War will endure.