FDL Book Salon Welcomes Dexter Filkins: The Forever War

Like a lot of people, I think I first took notice of Dexter Filkins’ work for the New York Times in Iraq during the Marines’ November 2004 invasion of Falluja. Filkins didn’t just cover that story. He brought it to you block by block, matching the intensity of the fighting that took place, and took place for an uncertain goal.

Last week I attended a counterinsurgency conference in Kansas that the Army and the Marine Corps jointly sponsored, and one of the case studies was that battle, which the military tends to bloodlessly call 2nd Fallujah. The instructor, an Army lieutenant colonel named Mark Ulrich, took as a given that when the counterinsurgent force pressed into the city, the insurgents dispersed outward, north to Mosul, where for two weeks they actually took control of one of Iraq’s most populous cities, and eastward to Samarra and Ramadi. But at the time, the senior Marine commander, Lt. Gen. John Sattler, boasted that his forces had "broken the back of the insurgency."

Conscientious and careful reporters, Filkins paramount among them, dutifully explored the reasons why that wasn’t true, seeding the bed for case-study assessments like the one Ulrich delivered to young counterinsurgents last week.

That commitment to diligence runs through The Forever War, Filkins’ chronicle of his journeys through Iraq and Afghanistan, which makes it as excellent as you’d expect. Unlike what I consider the two previous classics of the Iraq war, Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid and The Assassin’s Gate by George Packer, Filkins isn’t reluctant to make himself a character in the story. (In fairness, Packer sort of recurs throughout his book, but not to the extent of The Forever War.)

This is half-history and half-memoir, a guided tour through a war of limitless complexity, and the result is an immediacy that’s hard to match. A 22-year old Marine is killed helping Filkins and photographer Ashley Robertson get a picture in a Fallujah mosque’s minaret. A barefoot Mahdi Army commander shows the soles of his feet to Filkins and his translator and talks about on his calluses right before one of the defining moments of the war. An Army captain advertises that he’ll auction off one of his company’s woman soldiers to distract the male population of an Iraqi town in order to conduct house-to-house raids.

That narrative choice has its implications. There’s not a hint of polemic in Filkins’ book, which is probably as it should be. I don’t know what Filkins thinks about the Iraq war — I might think I know, but I don’t, really. Some have compared The Forever War to Michael Herr’s classic Vietnam reportage/memoir Dispatches, but that book has an undercurrent of rage at the Vietnam war that doesn’t appear to motivate Filkins.

If there’s a criticism to be made of The Forever War, it’s that sometimes it can be difficult to move from the ground truth Filkins presents to a larger picture of the Iraq war. Perhaps Filkins thought it wasn’t appropriate to give one. Perhaps he thought his audience has already drawn its own conclusions. Perhaps, like many of us, he isn’t entirely sure what to make of the whole painful endeavor.

In any event, we’re lucky to have him here at FDL to discuss this all with us. On the two occasions I’ve reported from Iraq and the one occasion I’ve reported from Afghanistan, I’ve marvelled at how a journalist could remain in countries so dangerous and so unfamiliar for so long and keep not only his or her professionalism, but a hold on sanity. War doesn’t only afflict the combatants and the innocents, as Chris Hedges confessed, but also the chroniclers. I’ll confess to feeling guilty over the privilege I had to leave Iraq and Afghanistan, and further felt guilty about spending insufficient time there to cover wars of such sprawling, awful magnitude.

Right before I left for Afghanistan this fall, I read this Filkins piece from the Times, a tour through the now-largely (but not entirely) pacified city of Falluja, and wondered how it must have felt for him to return. Few have seen as much, or been as much a credit to the finest traditions of their profession, as Dexter Filkins. His book isn’t just a portrait of two wars, it’s an example of how journalism ought to operate.

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2. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Dahr Jamail, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan
3. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Jurgen Todenhofer, Why Do You Kill?: The Untold Story of the Iraqi Resistance
4. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld
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