Author of the immensely successful A Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger’s War narrates the experiences of the journalist cum writer’s on-again off-again year long sojourn with US soldiers in the height of the Afghan conflict in what many analysts said was the remotest and most dangerous part of the Afghan war; the Korengal Valley.Here soldiers are on alert on a daily basis for enemy sniper fire and every patrol into the dust ridden mountain could mean instant death. Junger attempts to give a holistic idea of what it means to be at war but his ‘war’ is more ‘battle’ than war. He only talks about the situation of a platoon of soldiers who are apparently unaware of the sweeping developments in the bigger picture. They are fighting machines, equipped with the brawn and the intelligence necessary to cope with an environment of severe and unpredictable gunfights interspersed with long periods of boredom. Ultimately, the ones with the most blood lust survive.
His soldier is a person unaware of the reasons why the conflict is taking place, and fights the war for a cause completely different to those of his government. The soldier is a being who has ended up in the army for various reasons, and only few of them are there because of a deep sense of patriotism. The word patriot, in fact, is barely mentioned in the whole book. They fight for their ‘brothers’ or ‘platoon-mates’ and sacrifice their lives not for the American cause but to save the lives of their fellow soldiers.
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