Troops in Afghanistan opened up to ‘War’ author

“War” by Sebastian Junger, $26.99

On a typically blissful Sunday morning in Southern California, physically and figuratively about as far as you can get from eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, hundreds of people have come to hear author Sebastian Junger speak about men at war on the other side of the world.

Junger’s latest book, “War,” has been compared to Michael Herr’s Vietnam-era “Dispatches.” To an audience at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA, the journalist is quick to highlight the differences between Herr’s subject and his own.

Vietnam, he explains, was an unpopular war fought with draftees, while the war in Afghanistan has broader public support and a force that willingly signed up to fight.

The point is driven home by the audience when Junger introduces George Santana Rueda, a 23-year-old from the platoon Junger followed for more than a year, who happens to be in town on leave. The audience breaks into heartfelt applause. This is the age of al-Qaida, not Aquarius; as in the book and among the soldiers themselves, political debate was largely absent from the auditorium. And there’s a book festival outside, not a ’60s revolution.

With his blue-eyed, chiseled and starting-to-grizzle looks, Junger is just the specimen Hollywood would cast as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan to ensure a box office hit. The author of “The Perfect Storm” and “A Death in Belmont” is a guy’s guy type who would seem certain to get along with an all-male unit that saw more combat than almost any other ahead of President Obama’s surge in Afghanistan.

But to assume Junger had easy access diminishes his reporting skills and his commitment to the story. At age 48, he’s a generation older than most of the soldiers he accompanied into combat over the course of their 15-month deployment and who instinctively put up their guard against an outsider. In fact, Rueda admitted later, the guys spent most of their time trying to avoid Junger during his first couple of monthlong stints with them.

“But he kept coming back,” Rueda said. “I guess it was when he got blown up by the IED (Junger was in an armored vehicle that ran over an improvised explosive device) that we realized he really wanted to be there, that he was going through the same things we were, and we accepted him and decided we could teach him what we knew.”

Yet he did spend months — between summer 2007 and summer 2008 — in hostile territory, dug into the steep hillsides at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains and surrounded by Afghan Taliban, where soldiers ate one hot meal a day, showered once a week, burned their feces and alternated between weeks of unbearable boredom and as many as 13 gun battles a day. He calls it the “Afghanistan of Afghanistan,” remote and unconquerable, with June heat above 100 degrees and winter snowstorms, a place that previous units had said could “alter your mind in terrible and irreversible ways.”

A Wesleyan graduate with a degree in cultural anthropology, Junger explains countries in crisis and men in danger reveal “pretty interesting things” about the human condition. On previous trips to Afghanistan, he had written about the Afghan people, but this time he wanted to document the life of a platoon of combat infantry in the U.S. Army and was embedded with Battle Company, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, now on the front lines of the fight against the Taliban.

Soldiers, he discovered, generally don’t worry about the politics or moral basis for war, or even necessarily the long-term prospects for its success. They are consumed with the job they’ve been sent to do.

Junger’s book variously describes this bond among soldiers in terms of family, religion and love. “You’re necessary to everyone else and everyone is necessary to you,” he said.

Junger found himself deeply affected by his experience with Battle Company. “I was incredibly emotional writing the book,” he said. “People think you get emotional because you’re upset and traumatized. In this case it wasn’t that. I just felt a lot of connection with these guys.”