The tip of the spear

WAR

By Sebastian Junger

300 pages

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

By Norman Mailer

721 pages

Both available at National Book Store

Reporting on war goes back a long way, probably starting with Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War (around 431 B.C.). You’d think all those centuries reading about war — not to mention seeing movies, TV shows, and occasional news coverage from battle zones — would put a damper on people’s enthusiasm for fighting in them. Nuh-uh.

From Sebastian Junger, best known for his novel The Perfect Storm, comes an account of the US soldiers stationed in Korangal Valley, Afghanistan, inside a remote ad-hoc base nicknamed Restrepo (after a fallen US medic). War, the book, is an add-on of sorts to a recent documentary movie called Restrepo co-directed by Junger, who was embedded from ‘07 to ’08 with US forces in what some call “the most dangerous place in the world” and what US generals refer to as “the tip of the spear.” What we have in Junger’s account has touches of Michael Herr’s Dispatches — the writer, toting a 10-pound video camera at all times along with notebooks and pens, becomes enmeshed with the US soldiers until objectivity is beside the point. He’s simply, and very dangerously, living the lives they’re leading. He’s astonished by their ways of dealing with fear, the reserves of strength found in both wiry, 120-pound men and 300-pound human bears who must slog hundreds of pounds of equipment up the face of a sheer hillside called The Rock to get to Restrepo.

Korangal is so dangerous, Junger writes, because the Taliban has been able to play on the isolation and conservative fundamentalism of the locals there for decades, portraying any outsiders — whether they be Russian, US or any other force — as infidels (indeed, many US soldiers stationed there have taken to tattooing “Infidel” on their own chests). Shades of Vietnam, the locals — funded and prodded by the Taliban — have devised ingenious ways of disrupting US operations there (never mind that the US troops are often busy trying to win the hearts and minds of Korangal locals by building schools and hospitals — what one officer calls the “human terrain” of war). The Taliban use goatherds as scouts, knowing such men are unlikely to get shot by US troops; they position children near themselves when using hand-held radios for the same reason. Aware that Apache helicopters use infrared sensors, the Taliban become invisible by wrapping themselves in blankets and lying down on warm rocks under the sun. Illegal logging operations in the area also ensure there are plenty of enormous felled cedar logs for Taliban to hide in and take position against US troops.

The tip of the spear, we learn, is a place far beyond the immediate assistance of US military reinforcement. The men go without baths or running water for a month at a time; they live only on rations and ammo. It’s enough, apparently. These are men born to fight. Their job, basically, is to hold the US position (about one-fourth the size of Korangal Valley, which is as big as Staten Island) and routinely go out on foot patrols where they will inevitably draw Taliban fire and try to give some back. They are well prepared for an Alamo-type attack. (“There’s probably enough ammo at Restrepo to keep every weapon rocking for an hour straight until the barrels have melted and the weapons have jammed and the men are deaf and every tree in the valley has been chopped down with lead.”)

Junger is at his best capturing the chatter of war at the ground level — whether listening to soldiers shoot the bull in quiet times, or when the firefights start and chatter turns staccato and surreal. He divides his account into three — “Fear,” “Killing” and “Love” — and though these are themes familiar to us from a thousand war movies, they’re given a fresh, new immersion because Junger is himself part of the drama.

Yet this is a modern war: Junger is recording it all on video. Months later — and sometimes right after a firefight — he reviews the video, to find out what he missed. It’s a war where wounded soldiers slip on their iPods and suck on lollipops while medics sew up their arms and legs before shooting in the morphine. It’s a war very different from the Pacific battles witnessed by Norman Mailer, captured in his classic first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948).

Mailer writes about the preparations for battle, the endless slogs through time, battling fear and sleeplessness by playing poker (Junger’s officers have their men fistfight each other to kill boredom). It’s a book dripping with tropical heat, the fetid jungles and brackish waters of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. (Mailer apparently spent a lot of his service time in the Philippines as well.) Some say it’s Mailer’s best, and The Naked and the Dead may even be the best document of the war experience as fiction. His immersion in character and setting — accents, personal tics and details — is no less impressive than Junger’s nonstop video feeds.

There are other differences. Mailer’s fellow soldiers during WWII were draftees. There was a culture then of obeying orders, but griping about the military hierarchy in your spare time. (“Hurry up and wait” is a frequent refrain in Mailer’s book.) It was a passive-aggressive way of snubbing your nose at authority. In Junger’s War, those in Afghanistan signed up to fight on their own; they weren’t drafted. There’s less open criticism of the military structure — less imagining that griping will make any difference — because these men are mostly professional soldiers; they do this for a living. Plus, they’re too busy scrambling and fighting to worry about abstractions such as the “morality” or “logic” of war. Or else they’re too smart to open their mouths and reveal their true thoughts and feelings around Junger.

(Another small thing: Mailer had to render his favorite adjective as “fug” back in 1948. Junger is no longer restrained by such self-censorship.)

Comparing the two books, the difference between the wars is like night and day; but the difference in the experience of war is nearly identical. Mailer wrote his account of the Pacific battles two, three years after the war ended, an “overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility,” as it were. This gives him an incredible presence on the page: everything else is white space, silence. Mailer’s prose (even when it’s overboiled) illuminates an experience in ways that he would rarely equal again. It’s a hell of a great read.

Junger’s book is more immediate, more of our times, and a valuable insight into a war that few Americans — let alone the rest of the world — knows about or seems to care much about. Perhaps the movie, Restrepo, will open more eyes. For now, War is a perfect reminder of how essential this “old media” practice of setting down and practicing journalism is in the real world.