Books: War

I planned to read War by Sebastian Junger (author of The Perfect Storm) after reading With the Old Breed. I wanted to take a look at the generational differences in soldiers in combat. The main question I explored was whether or not the quintessential, "greatest generation", patriotic, unselfish individual with a sense of gratitude and commitment to the United States still exists today. Eugene Sledge exemplified all that we view as right with American during the second World War. In short, it is apparent that although the two different generations of soldiers display their emotions in different ways, the nature of men in combat is eerily similar. The language, references and sexual disclosure reflects the differences in society, but the sentiments and relationship between the men is comparable. In both situations they do not care about who is who or who is from from, as long as you know you can count on the man next to you to do his job, you accept him. It is a pretty powerful concept seeing as how in America it is pretty easy to disagree and display your disagreement without any consequences. I venture to say that most Americans have ever had to put forth such a magnitude of trust. We can only imagine how profound and powerful its consequences are, win or lose. Sebastian Junger goes on a few trips to Afghanistan to live with soldiers in some of the most dangerous war zones in the past five years. He was in a remote outpost for a few weeks. Junger gains the trust of the soldiers and he does a splendid job describing the pain and triumphs they experience. The war affects the men in unique ways that I think is very difficult for any civilian to understand. That is one of the reasons why I was not thrilled with this book. My ignorance of the situations these men have been in prevent me from connecting to their reactions and thoughts about the war and their fellow soldiers. I sometimes did not understand the way the men acted when certain things happened. The book is definitely not Junger's best but he has a handful of moments where he writes brilliantly. A couple passages in the book are some of the best contemporary non-fiction descriptions I have read. One of these such passages questions if courage is a uniquely human trait and why men feel the need to be courageous when other species almost never display such unselfish acts (pg 245). Another passage talks about the excitement of war and how the men become so addicted to the action that they dread returning to civilian life for the lack of excitement (pg 144). He writes
"War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them....War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. in some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn't where you might die-though that does happen-it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living".
I give Junger 3 out of 5 red hunting caps. I was going to give it only 2 but he did a commendable job tackling a subject that onlookers have struggled to describe for decades.
At the beginning of Book Three, titled "Love", Junger quotes J. Glenn Gary from The Warriors.


"The coward's fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others' live stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death."