TOW #16: IRB (2)

Sebastian Junger's book War, an account of his time in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan during American occupation of the country in the late aughts, spends much of its time humanizing war. Junger focuses much of the first half of the book on the relationships between soldiers and the psychological effects of war that are seldom seen in press clippings of numbers of dead and progress made. The human aspect of war is a very important part of Junger's attempt to show war at its rawest and most honest, and in the second half of the book Junger also highlights the distortions between the progress we think is being made oversees in short news clippings and what is actually happening. In comparing the distorted and overly optimistic view of the U.S's progress in Afghanistan to the haphazard reality, Jungr effectively shows how war is much less black and white, and (in the case of Afghanistan) much more dire than the average civilian American would know.

Junger's account of the war in Afghanistan is far from saccharine. Much of the book consists of first hand accounts of the bloody, gruesome firefights between the Taliban and Battle Company on the Abas Ghar in the Korengal Valley. The death's of Americans are frequent and ironically unheroic, and the deaths caused by the American's follow in the same way. However, if you listened to military press officers, who presented only part of the truth about the war (the positive truth), you wouldn't know that. Junger shows this distinction to the average civilian by comparing the truth of war (which he has been describing throughout the entirety of the book) to what he calls "Vietnam moments". According to Junger, "Vietnam moments" were when journalists "weren't so much getting misled as getting asked to participate in a kind of collective wishful thinking" (Junger 132). Junger provides an example of this when he recounts how "more American soldiers were killed that year than any previous year before" (Junger 132), but this was distorted as being the cause of soldiers "taking the fight to the enemy"(Junger 132). This tweaking of the facts often distorts the public's perception of a war, and simplifies it into a black and white conflict that is an easier pill to swallow. Through showing the disconnect between how the war is presented and how it actually is, Junger demystifies the often-shrouded-in-mystery nature of war. This, along with his harrowing descriptions of the fear felt by soldiers in firefights and the connection between soldiers, does not necessarily argue against war but seemingly shows it in its rawest and most unadulterated context.