At a time when trust in the American news media is at historic lows, The Forever War is a demonstration of the invaluable journalism that is so necessary for being informed about the world and makes democracy possible. Before reading this book I knew almost nothing about my country’s war in Iraq and I didn’t know how little I knew. The way the US was operating in Iraq, its agendas and processes, the personalities entrusted with the success or failure of the project, the enemies we faced, the experience of Iraqi civilians caught in the conflict, the potential or lack thereof for installing a Democracy in the wake of Saddam Hussein, the reality of the conflict on the ground, the causalities of the conflict, the experience of our troops, etc.
The book covers the initial invasion of Iraq until 2008, so it doesn't speak directly to the rise of ISIS in Iraq, but it gives invaluable context necessary for understanding why ISIS happened.
The book opens with the author’s experience of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City. After describing the carnage around him, Filkins reflects:
All those street vendors who worked near the World Trade Center, from all those different countries, selling falafel and schwarma. When they heard the planes and watched the towers they must have thought the same as I did: that they’d come home (p. 45).
The Forever War gives us access to a place where terror and bombs are a fixture of day-to-day life. In describing the terror attacks that permeated Iraqi cities shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein:
They started to come in waves. Four a day. Ten a day. Twelve a day. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Sometimes, all of them before breakfast….No one wanted to stand in a crowd anymore. No one wanted to stand in line. Every morning the Iraqis who worked for the Americans in the Green Zone lined up for security checks before they were allowed inside, and the lines stretched for hundreds of yards into the streets, sometimes for hours….One after the other, the car bombs flew into the lines. One after another, men wearing puffy jackets wandering into the lines, sweaty and nervous, mumbling to themselves, then exploding.
After a while, everything started to sound like a bomb. A door slamming in the house sounded like a bomb. A car back-firing sounded like a bomb. Sometimes it felt like the sounds of bombs and the call to prayer were the only sounds the country could produce, its own strange national anthem (p. 174).
Like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, this book is written in a style that is concise and understated, but paints a vivid picture of unfathomable suffering – human beings in the orbit of anarchy and violence. There are no poetic flourishes, only harsh and haunting experiences from which the mind reels. In one episode, Filkins maneuvering with a group marines at night describes the scene of their commander accidentally approving a massive air strike on their own position and noticing the mistake just seconds before the whole company is annihilated. In a separate episode, after a fire-fight with an insurgent shooting at American troops from a minaret, Filkin’s and his photographer Ashley start running toward the minaret to get a picture of the dead insurgent.
…Ash and I stepped to go through the door when a pair of Marines stepped in front of us. We’ll go first, they said….and they bounded up the stairs. Ashley with his camera fell in behind them and I was behind Ashley.
…The shot was loud inside the staircase, and I couldn’t see much, because the second marine was falling backwards, falling onto Ashley, who fell onto me. Warm liquid spattered on my face. Three of us tumbled backward out of the doorway….The shot had come from farther up the stairs. A very loud shot. Then tumbling and screaming and then quiet. The guy who had fired was in the minaret, at the top of the stairs, sitting up there.
Filkins goes on to describe a scene of panic and chaos as marines storm the minaret to rescue Miller, the shot American soldier trapped inside.
Again and again they went up, Goggin and the others, and there were more shots and more dust and more loud fucks. I wondered how many people were going to die to save Miller, who was shot for a picture. The insurgents didn’t leave their dead behind, and neither did the marines….Maybe the whole platoon would die, I thought.
Eventually:
Miller appeared. Two marines had pulled him out, Goggin one of them, chocking and coughing…Miller was on his back; he’d come out head first. His face was opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe, with the two sides jiggling.
“Please tell me he’s not dead,” Ash said. “Please tell me.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
As they are running for cover through a storm of bullets:
“I want to die,” I heard Ashley say. “I hope they shoot me.” (p. 209-210)
Later in the book, Filkins meets and is received warmly by Miller’s parents.
In addition to describing the experience of combat, this book is about the reality of military occupation and doomed project of nation-building in Iraq. The extravagant aims of America’s investment into Iraqi society are undermined by shocking levels of corruption and incompetence and chaos at every level. From a meeting between the American army leadership and Iraqi provincial government officials:
They moved on to the next topic: the bank robbery. “Yesterday, about 10 billion Iraqi dinars disappeared from the Rafidain Bank in downtown Ramadi,” one of the marines said. “That’s about $7 million.”
“It’s most of the bank’s deposits,” Rashid said.
“How did they do that?” Colonel MacFarland asked. “There’s an American overwatch post right next door. You’d need several trucks to carry out that much money. Did anyone see anything?”
“Apparently no one saw anything,” Governor Rashid said.
“There were more than 150 people in the bank that day,” Colonel Corte said. “That doesn’t sound right to me, Governor.”
The governor agreed.
“It is hard to believe that with this much military presence next door, they could do this,” Rashid said. “It must have been an inside job.”
MacFarland weighed in again. “People’s life savings were in there,” he said. “Were the deposits insured?”
The governor allowed himself a small smile.
“In Iraq, we don’t have that,” he said.
After an hour, the meeting ended. We stood up and gathered near the front door.
A marine gave the usual warning.
“Sniper area – run!” he shouted, and everyone leaving the meeting ran (p. 311-312).
Filkins describes brutal and dangerous policing in which soldiers conduct door-by-door raids, often netting no weapons and no arrests and characterized by Filkins as: “Americans making enemies faster than they could kill them” (153).
The tenor of this project is well summed up by a Colonel Nathan Sassaman:
“I think we are close,” he said. “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”
Filkins, shocked by this suggestion, asks Sassaman if he really thinks that “fear and violence” is what is needed to rebuild Iraq. Sassaman confirms this is what he thinks. On the immense cultural divide separating the Iraqi people from their American occupiers:
Some of Sassaman’s soldiers had begun throwing around the phrase, “the Arab mind,” which they had picked up from a pseudoscientific book by the same name that was popular among American officers. One of them was Captain Brown.…”You’ve got to understand the Arab mind,” Brown told me outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing they understand is force-force, pride and saving face” (p. 160).
Unsurprisingly, Sassaman tactics led him to be discharged by the army. Marwan and Zaydoon were two Iraqis who were pushed off a ledge at gun point into the Tigris river at night, a practice common among Sassaman’s men. Zaydoon drowned that night leading to the arrest of two American soldiers under his command. Filkins gives a sad epilogue to the story that seems to highlight the inescapable effects of psychological trauma that haunts many soldiers once they come back home:
In the case of Marwan and Zaydoon, [Ralph] Logan was the only American who acted with unquestioned honor. Logan, a low-ranking specialist from Indian Lake, Ohio, had been in the Bradley that night when his comrades spotted Marwan and Zaydoon driving around after curfew. He’d helped cuff them. But when his lieutenant ordered him to throw Marwan and Zyodoon into the Tigris, Logan refused. Logan’s commander was angry with him, but he let him stay behind in the road. The other soldiers walked Marwan and Zayoon down to the riverbank….Like Sassaman, he’d left the army, too. “Basically, the guys in the unit made it clear they didn’t want me around anymore,” Logan said.
…
On the night of September 10, 2006, Logan walked into the lobby of a Comfort Inn motel and robbed the attendant at knife-point. Then Logan drove to his mother’s home. He left the $4,000 he got from the hotel in a bag in the car….Three days later, a police officer came to the house…Logan had been waiting for him. He confessed on the spot. He got two years in prison. His mother, Nany, visits him twice a month…she’d never heard about Marwan and Zaydoon (165-167).
Filkins’ book describes the transition from the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein to the anarchy and sectarian violence that sprouted its wake. For civilian Iraqis, that transition is well summed up by a diagram drawn by an interpreter named Yusra al-Hakeem:
She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page.…She drew a large circle in the middle.
“This is Sadaam,” she said. “He is here. Big. During Saddam’s time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard.”
She flipped to another blank page. She drew dozens of circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.
“The dot in the middle, that is me – that is every Iraqi,” she said. “From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here.” She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.
“We Iraqis,” she said. “We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom” (p. 326).
One of the most dramatic moments in the book, is the day of Iraq’s ultimately unsuccessful first democratic election in 2005:
The Iraqis came with mixtures of pride and defiance on their faces. Husbands and wives and children were walking together, some of the men in coats and ties. Mortar shells were exploding nearby.
…
I turned off the main drag in Karada toward the Marjayoon Primary School. People were waiting in silence in long lines between colis of barbed wire. They were shuffling inside, without a sound, as bombs exploded a block away.
….
I spotted a young woman with eyes so bright they seemed to beam out of her head scarf. Her name was Batool al-Musawi. She was a physical therapist and a newlywed. Her parents stood by.
“I woke up this morning at 7 a.m., and I could hear the exlposions outside,” Musawi told me. “And I threw the covers back over my head. I did not want to come. I was too afraid. It is so bad now. And then, hearing those explosions, it occurred to me – the insurgents are weak, they are afraid of democracy, they are losing. So I got my husband, and I got my parents, and we all came out and voted together.
…
I stepped inside Lebanon High School, another polling place. It was filled and it was quiet. The explosions were thundering outside. A middle-aged man looked up from the ledger, a finger pointed to the ceiling.
“Do you hear that, do you hear the bombs?” Hassan Jawad said, calling out to me over the thud of a shell. “We don’t care. Do you understand? We don’t care.”
“We all have to die,” Jawad said. “To die for this, well, at least I will be dying for something.”
And then he got back to work, guiding an Iraqi woman’s hand to the ballot box (p. 243).
A few miles away, a woman stepped from the voting booth at Yarmouk Elementary School...Her name was Bushra Saadi....Why vote at all? I asked Saadi. Why not just stay home?
She shot me a withering look.
"I voted in order to prevent my country from being destroyed by its enemies," she said.
What enemies? I asked Saadi. What enemies are you refering to?
"You–you destroyed our country," Saadi said. "The Americans the British. I am sorry to be impolite. But you destroyed our country, and you called it democracy."
"Democracy," she said. "It is just talking" (p. 244).
There’s nothing political about this book. Having read the book, I don’t have a hint about Filkins’ political leanings. However, as a politically minded person, I can’t help but read the book through the lens of American politics. For me, this books makes it harder to see the “Islamic world” as a monolith and makes it harder to think about or treat and refugees as potential terrorists. More than anything, The Forever War is about a universal humanity shared by American soldiers and Iraqi civilians and about learning from our nation's mistakes in Iraq and using it as a foundation for selecting the policies that can move us in the direction of a better future.
The scene after a young Terry Lisk is helicoptered away in a body-bag:
In the darkness, as the sound of the helicopter faded, Colonel MacFarland walked to the front of the group.
“I don’t know if this war is worth the life of Terry Lisk, or 10, or 2,500 soldiers like him,” the colonel said. “What I do know is that he did not die alone.”
“A Greek philosopher said that only the dead have seen the end of war,” Colonel MacFarland said. “Only Terry Lisk has seen the end of this war.”
The Soldiers turned and walked back to their barracks in the darkness. No one said a word (329).
