What is The Forever War about?

Dexter Filkins spent more than a decade covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times, and The Forever War is his attempt to render what he witnessed in a form that is closer to literature than journalism. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008. It does not argue a thesis about American foreign policy or provide a strategic overview of either war. Instead, it accumulates scenes: a Taliban execution in a Kabul soccer stadium, a night assault on a Fallujah street, a suicide bombing at a Baghdad marketplace, a conversation with an insurgent who cannot quite explain why he is fighting.

Filkins writes in a compressed, present-tense style that strips away editorial distance. The prose rarely tells you how to feel. A scene ends and another begins, and the effect is of immersion rather than analysis. He is interested in the texture of violence — how it feels to run toward a building under fire, what the aftermath of a car bombing looks like — but also in the moments of normalcy and connection that persist alongside it: friendships with interpreters, meals with soldiers, conversations with ordinary Afghans and Iraqis trying to live their lives in circumstances of extreme danger.

The book covers Filkins's time in Afghanistan before and after September 11, the fall of the Taliban, the Iraq invasion and its descent into sectarian war, and his return visits to both countries years later. He is present at some of the most significant events of the wars — the battle of Fallujah in 2004 was among the most intense urban combat Americans had experienced since Vietnam — and his account of that battle is one of the most vivid pieces of war writing in contemporary American literature.

Filkins is not a detached observer. The book is partly about what bearing witness does to the witness. He describes the psychological cost of years spent in proximity to violence, the difficulty of readjusting to civilian life, and the strange pull of the war zone for those who have spent enough time there. For anyone trying to understand what the post-9/11 wars actually felt like from the inside, The Forever War is the closest available account.