The Forever War
Dexter Filkins. New York: Knopf, 2008. 384 pp. Illus. $25.
Reviewed by Paul West
The Marine assault on Fallujah in November 2004 is the opening scene of The Forever War. In cinematic fashion, the Americans advance through darkened streets at two in the morning. AC/DC's heavy-metal anthem, "Hells Bells," pumped through loudspeakers at the edge of town, provides the soundtrack. From a minaret, outlined by bursts of light from air strikes, another loudspeaker rouses jihadis with the news that the Americans have arrived and the Holy War has begun.
Movies about the conflict in Iraq have come and gone, usually quickly, box-office bombs for the most part. An ever-expanding library of eyewitness accounts draws far too few eyeballs. With casualties down and economic contagion consuming the public's attention, Iraq has faded from the minds of most Americans. U.S. forces remain there, at close to peak strength, while the corps of media correspondents has dwindled.
Still, the story needs to be told. Dexter Filkins is one of the more talented correspondents of the post-9/11 era, a protégé of the great John Burns, a New York Times colleague. Filkins' memoir is a worthy addition to the literature of U.S. involvement in the region.
This is not a Big Picture book or policy tome. It is not even chronological, which makes it difficult to put events in context.
The Forever War is, instead, a highly literate collection of personal impressions and experiences, sketched, at times, with a dry wit bordering on black humor. This is history from the bottom up, an unsparing look into the abyss of Afghanistan and Iraq. Indelible images of violence, chaos, and death are rendered at close range in highly personal terms from a dark age in our own time.
The Forever War spreads out across the author's nine years in the region and, in one case, back home—a 9/11 visit to the smoldering pit of the World Trade Center ruins, where some New York City cops try on cashmere topcoats at 3 a.m. in a Brooks Brothers store. Filkins had curled up to sleep inside, having spent hours avoiding police checkpoints to enter the site.
The book's title comes from an interview with a Tajik warlord that Filkins recounts in the early chapters, which are devoted to Afghanistan and, in light of recent events, are perhaps the most instructive part of the book. If President-elect Obama is true to his campaign promises, U.S. foreign policy will increasingly shift away from Iraq toward Afghanistan.
Filkins is hooked on the adrenaline rush of war correspondence. He is a thrill-seeker as well as an astute observer and fluid writer. But The Forever War isn't, primarily, about the American military. Others have taken extended looks at U.S. fighters in Iraq, such as Evan Wright, whose Generation Kill follows a Marine unit into the 2003 invasion.
There are, nonetheless, vivid portraits of the grunts who carry the fight (and whose respect Filkins was proud to earn). He tells the heartbreaking story of a 22-year-old lance corporal from Texas who was shot dead helping Filkins and his photographer get a picture of a dead insurgent. The company commander authorized his Marines to help the journalists, because the newspaper wanted photographic proof of body counts the United States was reporting.
Filkins writes sensitively and movingly of the Soldiers and Marines he meets. He describes their heroism and their innocence, but as he says, he doesn't sentimentalize. They are "trained killers, after all."
No one is spared, including the author. Only a reckless, arrogant person, he writes, would make a habit, as he did, of jogging in Baghdad's 120-degree heat, an American target in a country that had descended into anarchy.
Filkins' Iraq is a hall of mirrors; heartless, and rife with conspiracies and mistrust. The people are both maddeningly complex and disarmingly simple. Like Afghanistan, it's a place where allegiances can be rented, full of con artists and double-talkers, where respect for brute force always seems paramount.
When he left two years ago, Iraq appeared to be a society broken beyond repair. But Filkins returned recently and found he barely recognized the place. "[I]f this is not peace it is not war, either," he wrote in late September, "at least not the war I knew."
The Two Thousand Yard Stare: Tom Lea's World War II
Tom Lea (author), Brendan M. Greeley (ed.). College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. 256 pp. Illus. Notes. $40.
Reviewed by Colonel Charles Waterhouse, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
A delightful coffee-table book has just come off the presses, telling the story of how during World War II, a young, land-locked Texan became the very first American artist-correspondent for Life magazine, at the time the largest and most popular weekly photo news journal in the world.
The Two Thousand Yard Stare brilliantly displays Tom Lea's paintings from this period and intersperses the artwork with personal photographs that enhances their impact.
The text that editor Brendan Greeley has chosen to include, gleaned from the artist's own prose and notes, reveals Lea's innocence and eagerness at that time. Lea was the first of many civilian artists and writers to cover the war. He documented his first Navy shipboard experience in paintings and drawings—the storm-filled Atlantic crossing that reveals the activities of the newly arrived U.S. Navy presence in Greenland, Iceland, and in the pre-Pearl Harbor North Atlantic patrol area. This first series of Lea's artworks depicting the North Atlantic patrol was published in the 11 May 1942 issue of Life. The pictures appeared in full color, duotones, and in black-and-white reproductions.
They were an immediate success, and Life's editors suggested a short rest before another assignment; this time to Randolph Field, Texas, to cover Army Air Force training. Next Lea was sent to cover the Central and South Pacific and naval actions off Guadalcanal, where he would lose some close crew mates and a ship. After that he found himself in Army Air Force activities in England, North Africa, and China.
Greeley has included many of Lea's portraits of the fighting men he served with—dramatic statements evoking great expression and mood. Some depict powerful players on the world stage, but all of Lea's subjects are treated with insight and respect. It is the canvases of the fighting men performing their duties that draw the most attention. Especially the series painted of actions at Peleliu in September 1944.
As former artist-in-residence, U.S. Marine Corps, I sometimes leave the studio to attend special events at the U.S. Marine Corps museum at Quantico. Some years ago, I attended the opening there of a showing of Lea's Peleliu Series, where he was presented an award of merit. Tom and I spent part of the evening chatting about our respective careers.
We agreed that these paintings were the most powerful statements of his career. "Going In," "The Two Thousand Yard Stare," and "The Price," transcend the printed page. These images are branded in the visual memories of Marine veterans who participated in and witnessed similar acts of extreme violence. Once, when faced with the criticism that his painting "The Price" was so bitter and unreal as to become an abstraction or fantasy, Lea responded, "Mortar fire does some very peculiar things."
After the war, Lea's production never slowed, but his attention turned to local, more peaceful themes, subjects close to his Texas heart. He wrote books that were made into films. But it is of his Life assignments that he once said, "I am grateful to God for letting me do this."
Technology and the American Way of War since 1945
Thomas G. Mahnken. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 244 pp. Notes. Index. $29.50.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel William J. Astore, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
Thomas Mahnken, currently the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning, examines the American military's relationship to technology from the end of World War II to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two technological revolutions, he concludes, have dominated this period: nuclear weaponry and the information revolution associated with computers, satellites, and network-based warfare.
He cautions that Americans are prone to technological optimism, giving rise to breathless predictions that new technology will somehow disperse the fog of war, with commanders gaining "total situational awareness." Dismissing such predictions as misguided, he nonetheless concludes that advanced technology has provided, and likely will continue to provide, important (if not always decisive) advantages to the U.S. military.
Nuclear weapons, Mahnken reminds us, dominated the military in the 1950s and early 1960s, enabling the Air Force, with its strategic bombers and ICBMs, to grab the lion's share of the defense budget. The Navy acted with celerity as well, creating a powerful subculture that celebrated nuclear propulsion as the fulfillment of submariners' dreams. Indeed, the nuclear imperative was so strong it drove a marginalized Army to develop nuclear artillery and tactical missiles just to be a player. But Mahnken's final point is telling—nuclear weapons, thought during most of the Cold War the be-all and end-all of military technology, are now marginal, even irrelevant, to today's shooting wars.
Most developments in American conventional weaponry have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, Mahnken writes. Yet the United States has been so single-minded in pursuing technical excellence that we have given further incentive to our enemies to attack us asymmetrically. Thus today's Navy is arguably less likely to face sophisticated attacks combining high-speed torpedoes with advanced anti-ship missiles and more likely to face sabotage by terrorists at port facilities or surprise assaults by explosive-laden speedboats.
Mahnken demonstrates how America's decisive edge in conventional and information technology produced resounding victories during Desert Storm and the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the latter's descent into insurgency and messy urban warfare neutralized, to an extent that caught the military off-guard, America's technological advantage. Improvements in more rudimentary technologies—helmets, body armor, and related protective devices—have reduced combat fatalities. Meanwhile, more advanced technologies—Predator UAVs, mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles, electronic intercept, and jammers—combined with counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics—have markedly reduced the enemy's successes. Creative use of technology, in other words, has made the cost of staying in Iraq "tolerable"—at least to the Bush administration.
But is this technology providing decisive, war-winning advantages Or is it merely allowing us to circle the drain longer Drawing a cautionary lesson from Vietnam, Mahnken notes that superior technology in the service of a seriously flawed strategy is not enough to snatch military victory from the jaws of politico-strategic defeat. If and when strategic success in Iraq is attained, it will be due more to the dedication and diverse skills of, and actionable intelligence gathered by, "strategic corporals" moving among the Iraqi people, than to stand-off high-tech weaponry.
Our tools of war not only provide capabilities for us; they create asymmetries that our enemies may be able to exploit, especially if we allow our faith in technology to blind us to the existence of these asymmetries.
Mahnken's study helps to reveal our sometimes hidden preconceptions and core beliefs about technology and war.
Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
Robin Wright. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. 480 pp. Notes. Index. $26.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Charles L. Armstrong, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
Robin Wright is the diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post. Her latest book represents the culmination of 30 years of inquiry and analysis into the murky geopolitical and cultural zones collectively called the Middle East.
She has achieved her access the old-fashioned way, by going repeatedly into dangerous areas to meet primary sources. Like any good journalist, she asks tough questions and remains objective.
Dreams and Shadows examines the history, current realities, and future prospects of the Middle East. While the history is well-documented in others' writings, Wright does an exceptional job presenting an easily-understood recap of the most important points along a timeline that spans millennia. For this reason alone, her work is useful to the lay reader—anyone trying to sort out who did what to whom, and why, throughout the ages.
Wright ties history to current realities. As she illustrates by developing chapters on several historically and contemporarily important countries and cultures (the Palestinians, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Morocco), the Middle East is not merely a single place. It is a vast geography populated by numerous ethnic and religious groups whose very diversity defies simple, homogenous categorization. By providing numerous anecdotes, the author puts a burr under the collective saddle of those who spout generalities about the region.
For instance, some readers may be surprised to learn that the largest concentration of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel live in Iran, where their participation in government is guaranteed. Or that Saladin, the Muslim warrior who outfought Crusader armies was not an Arab, but a Kurd born in Tikrit. Wright's book is rich with historical detail included not to provide trivial filler, but to stimulate thought and overcome stereotyping.
Wright paints verbal portraits to help readers whose personal Mideast experience may be limited to one or two specific regions. Many readers, for instance, have never met a victim of torture, know few grassroots political reformers, and have not encountered long-term political prisoners. Wright's careful observation and detailed descriptions bring these people to life.
It is her cautiously optimistic view of the Middle East's future, however, that differentiates Wright's work from that of her contemporaries. Drawing on exclusive interviews with important regional players from each of her focus countries, political parties, and religious sects, she describes a region's people wrestling with demons of change. Yet there is no trace of the Pollyanna in her commentary. Although some of her sources express high hopes for their countries' futures, the author evaluates their contributions without wishful thinking.
Wright is particularly skillful at connecting the dots scattered across a complex matrix of information to project logical trajectories for potential political developments. Readers who have followed her articles for years will not be surprised. She was, after all, one of the first journalists of our generation to "get" the turning point in history represented by the bombing of America's embassy in Beirut 25 years ago.
Not everyone will like her book. Readers who have already made up their minds about the Middle East may find her conclusions unpalatable. Nonetheless, Dreams and Shadows is a must-read for anyone who truly wants to better understand a region beset by the world's most complicated regional problems.