Al Nye The Lawyer Guy: WAR by Sebastian Junger

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WAR

By Sebastian Junger

Hachette Book Group

$26.99, hard cover, 287 pages, 978-0-446-55624-8 (2010)

Most folks in Maine are familiar with Sebastian Junger because he wrote The Perfect Storm – a New York Times best-selling novel that prominently mentions Linda Greenlaw, a local sword boat skipper and popular author.

For this book, Junger spent fifteen months in a single platoon based in the Korengal Valley – a remote outpost in foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of eastern Afghanistan. His objective was not to write an all-encompassing assessment of the war, but rather a close-up view of what war is like for the men of Battle Company.

Junger describes where he was embedded this way:

The Korengal Valley is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off. The Soviets never made it past the mouth of the valley and the Taliban didn’t dare go in there at all. When 10^th Mountain rolled into the valley in 2006, they may well have been the first military force ever to reach its southern end.

Junger’s outpost provided minimal comforts.

The base was called the Korengal Outpost – the KOP – and was considered one of the most dangerous postings in Afghanistan. It was a cheerless collection of bunkers and C-wire and bee huts that stretched several hundred years up a steep hillside toward a band of holly trees that had been shredded by gunfire. There was a plywood headquarters building and a few brick-and-mortars for the men to sleep in and small sandbag bunkers or mortar attacks. The men ate one hot meal a day under a green Army tent and showered once a week in water that had been pumped out of a local creek. Here and there PVC pipe was stuck into the ground at an angle for the men to urinate into. Since there were no women there was no need for privacy.

Because of the large amount of time he spent in Korengal Valley, Junger has the first-hand experience necessary to describe the day-to-day duties of a combat soldier: the anticipation of fighting; the valor during combat; and the confusion during ambushes. He also writes in a simple, declarative style that makes the action seem immediate and conveys the deadly consequences of war on a personal level.

The enemy was waiting for them. They opened fire from 300 yards away with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. A private named Ted Donoho dropped prone and was low crawling to cover when he saw a line of bullets stitching toward him in the dirt. He rolled to one side and wound up near PFC Vimoto. Both men began returning fire, bullets kicking up dirt all around them, and at one point Donoho saw Vimoto open his mouth as if he were about to yell something. No sound came out, though; instead, his head jerked back and then tipped forward. He didn’t move again.

Donoho started shouting for the platoon medic, but there was so much gunfire that no one could hear him. It didn’t matter anyway; the bullet had gone through Vimoto’s head and killed him instantly. One moment he was in the first firefight of his life, the next moment he was dead. Donoho shot through all twelve magazines he carried and then pulled more out of his dead friends ammo rack. There was so much gunfire that the only way the men could move without getting hit was to low-crawl. They were on a steep ridge at night getting raked by machine-gun fire, and everyone knew the MEDEVAC helicopters would never dare attempt a landing in those conditions; they were going to have to get Vimoto and another man named Pecsek down to the road to get picked up. Pecsek had been shot through the shoulder but seemed able to walk. A staff sergeant named Kevin Rice hoisted Vimoto onto his back, and the men started down the steep, rocky slopes of 1705 in the darkness and the rain.

Junger’s talent is allowing the reader to feel what the soldiers are experiencing.

Summer grinds on: a hundred degrees every day and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat. Some of the men are terrified of them and can only sleep in mesh pup tents, and others pick them up with pliers and light them on fire. The timber bunkers at Phoenix (a close residential compound rented by American soldiers) are infested with fleas, and the men wear flea collars around their ankles but still scratch all day long. First squad goes thirty-eight days without taking a shower or changing their clothes, and by the end their uniforms are so impregnated with salt that they can stand up by themselves. The men’s sweat reeks of ammonia because they’ve long since burned off all their fat and are now breaking down muscle. There are wolves out in the high peaks that howl at night and mountain lions that creep through the KOP looking for food and troops of monkeys that set to screeching from the crags around the base. One species of

bird sounds exactly like incoming rocket-propelled grenades; the men called them “RPG birds” and can’t keep themselves from flinching whenever they hear them.

This is a look at war up-close and personal. Junger pulls no punches and the reader feels an intimacy with soldiers who face mortal danger on a daily basis as they defend themselves and protect their brothers.

Buy it on Amazon here.

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