The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

I.
“People asked me about the war,” writes New York Times
correspondent Dexter Filkins in the epilogue to “The Forever War,” a
collection of stories drawn from eight years he spent reporting in
Afghanistan and Iraq. “They asked me whether it was as bad as people
said. ‘Oh, definitely,’ I told them, and then, usually, I stopped. In
the beginning, I’d go on a little longer, tell them a story or two, and
I could see their eyes go after a couple of sentences.” After living in
Iraq, Filkins realizes, “I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone who
hadn’t been there about anything at all.”

My eyes went, too, a few pages into the first of his graphic,
grinding vignettes from the front lines. “Vignette” seems too delicate
a word for these stories, in which an Iraqi insurgent’s head bursts
“like a tomato, the deep red of his brainy blood spattering against his
clammy skin,” an American marine’s face is “shredded like hamburger,”
and the beheadings and bombings of occupied Baghdad begin to feel
blasé. But tough as it is to read, my eyes could not help but return:
this book is the best, most terrible and most human account of war in
Iraq and Afghanistan for those of us who will never see it through our
own eyes.

Filkins is a sort of Orwell among the corpses. He reports the
macabre without emotion or bias, as in his
terse description of the
blown-off head of a suicide bomber: “some nicks and cuts and a thin
coating of dust, which gave the skin a yellow hue.” But he also has a
knack for telling, sometimes elegant, detail: “the most curious aspect”
of the same severed head “was the man’s eyebrows: they were raised, as
if in surprise.” It’s these details that set Filkins’ book apart from
his news reporting. Those surprised heads always fall to the ground
intact after a car bombing. The Taliban prefers the Toyota Hi-Lux.
Shiite insurgents are partial to mutilation with power drills while
Sunnis favor beheadings posted to YouTube.

The human details are where his story shines. Many writers have
chronicled the actions of American officials that led to war and the
tribulations of those who have executed it. These dispatches are a
different and much needed history, written in the fog among Afghans and
Iraqis. Here, he records the absurd and tragic and visceral scenes of
life during wartime, and the conversations that accompany them. Indeed,
this is a book about conversation as much as it is about war. Filkins
discovers “two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having
with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves.” The
conversation of an ordinary Iraqi “was the chatter of a whole other
world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the
Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it.” We
almost never saw Hussein Alawi, the provincial minister working with
the Army to rebuild a dam on the Euphrates who tells Filkins “I take
their money, but I hate them.” We almost never saw General Bassem
al-Gharrawi, commander of a Shiite police brigade who has killed no one
in English and fifty men in Arabic. We almost never saw Ra’ad al-Banna,
the 32-year-old Jordanian who, denied an American visa, drives a gas
tanker into a marketplace in Hilla and incinerates 166 people. We
almost never saw—but for Filkins.

Wonks may be disappointed. This book doesn’t explain the why and
how of the events that it records, or the machinations behind American
policy, but merely describes daily horrors without politics or
pretense. That’s quite enough. Chronology is also hard to follow—dates
are few, and the story isn’t always in order. Still, there is plenty
here to reward War Nerds, from a portrait of chameleon exile Ahmed
Challabi to prescient stories of Afghanistan during the early days of
the Taliban.

All good war correspondents must be a little crazy, and by this
measure, Filkins must be the best. He cheats death several times thanks
to his local comrades—his interpreter saves him from abduction by a
Sunni sheik and his driver pulls him from a savage mob in the aftermath
of a car bombing. He’s nearly killed when embedded with American
troops, too. The story of Lance Corporal William Miller, the marine who
takes a bullet to protect Filkins and his photographer colleague,
climbing a minaret to get a photo of a dead insurgent, is a haunting
and intimate anecdote. But if Filkins was not the kind of guy who
thinks nothing of going for an evening jog along the Tigris in the most
dangerous city in the world, this book would not exist.

Seven years on, it is easy to feel, as Filkins does while bullets
are flying and AC/DC is blaring during the siege of Fallujah, that Iraq
is “not my war, not my army.” There is no military draft to force
self-interest. Press coverage of the wars hovers at a paltry three
percent of all news, crowded out by the election and the economy.
Instead, as Filkins puts it, there is “a kind of underground
conversation about Iraq and Afghanistan…in Pearland and Osawatomie and
LaGrange.” Filkins’ book is a window to that conversation for the rest
of us, who push aside the wars to focus on Christmas shopping and final
exams. We will never know these wars. But at least we can overhear a
bit of the conversation.

II.
There is another conversation in Iraq that Filkins, who
spent most of his time reporting from perilous corners of the war, only
touches on in his book: that of the bureaucrats secluded in Baghdad’s
Green Zone. While Filkins was recording life outside the “Little
America” on the West Bank of the Tigris, The Washington Post’s Rajiv
Chandrasekaran was listening from inside the blast barrier. His book,
“Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” tells the story of the first year
of American occupation, under an American proconsulate led by L. Paul
Bremer.

L. Frank Baum was sometimes more apt, as the title suggests. The
Green Zone was a fantasy world divorced from the reality surrounding
it: “The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never
drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of American troops was
rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a
detonated car bomb didn’t fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and
Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world’s most ancient
cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside the calm sterility
of an American subdivision prevailed.” Like Filkins, Chandrasekaran’s
book is a series of dispatches from the Green Zone—less gruesome than
the rest of Baghdad, but just as sickening.

Were it not for the suffering outside the walls, these anecdotes
would have a morbid humor. Even so, I stifled the occasional errant
chuckle: if “Forever War” is a tragedy, “Imperial LIfe” is at least a
tragicomedy. The book catalogs the many well-meaning but misguided
projects dreamed up by the idealistic Americans in the Green Zone who
let the Best give no quarter to the good. There’s Jay Hallen, the
twenty-four-year old charged with rebuilding the Baghdad stock
exchange, who resolves “to make it the best, most modern stock market
in the Arab world.” As he schemes to rewrite securities regulationss,
install a computerized trading system, and cut staff, the exchange’s
newly-created governors reopen the market with nothing more than a
couple whiteboards and a few markers. There’s Peter McPherson, who
slashes marginal tax rates from forty-five to fifteen percent—never
mind that most Iraqis never bothered to pay taxes at all. And there’s
Bremer himself, whose zeal to purge senior Baath party members put
“‘fifty thousand Baathists underground before nightfall,’” in the words
of Baghdad’s CIA station chief. Sometimes it is truly ugly. “Who the
fuck are these people?” asks Bernie Kerik, the hero NYPD chief flown to
the Green Zone to advise the government on building a police force.
“Oh, those are Iraqis,” replies an aide.

The details of daily life speak volumes here, too. The
Halliburton-helmed cafeteria offers “a bottomless barrel of pork:
sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner,”
offending the few Iraqis working inside the Green Zone. Staffers read
the “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Iraq.” Bremer affects a
pair of tan combat boots with a blue suit inside even the seven most
secure square miles in Baghdad.

It’s not all bad—Chandrasekaran conveys genuine respect for those
Americans who did their best with limited resources and a frustrating
bureaucracy, like Steve Browning, the engineer who helps rebuild Iraq’s
electrical infrastructure and Don North, who leads an abortive attempt
to create an independent Iraqi-produced television channel. But their
humble, pragmatic work is outweighed by the hubris of their colleagues.

This Green Zone is now long gone, the proconsul replaced by an
Ambassador and the Republican Party animals replaced with foreign
service officers. Yet its legacy remains. “I don’t know what the guy’s
cause is…I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by it,” said President
Bush this week after an Iraqi reporter pelted him with shoes at a press
conference. Don’t know; not threatened. He was speaking from the very
heart—and soul—of the Green Zone.

Images courtesy of Flickr user MichaelFranks6

Downtown Owl: A Novel
by Chuck Klosterman

In the beginning, we are all Renaissance Men. We make paintings on Tuesdays, tell stories on Fridays, and dabble with music on the weekend. Soon, though, the song of Specialization (performed with the harmony of Employment) begins its enchantment, and interests fall by the wayside.

It is this song that leads many aspiring writers to journalism, one of the few options promising both the ability to write and to receive a biweekly paycheck for it. Many, however, are unhappy settling here, and dream of a writing world without daily deadlines, city councilmen, or co-workers. They want to make the Jump, to strike a blow into Specialization’s gut and reclaim a sense of diverse interests.

Yet this jump is not easy. Just ask William F. Buckley, the great mind behind God and Man at Yale, whose fiction veers on a pulpy precipice just above a Robert Ludlum Bourne thriller. Even those who have ostensibly succeeded — George Orwell and Hunter S. Thompson come to mind — really have not; the “fiction” designation is but a veneer covering the real subject, whether it is a political tract (as in Orwell’s 1984) or a memoir (as Thompson’s Rum Dairy).

This trail of trial has not scared Chuck Klosterman away. Perhaps it is the hubris of a successful young writer. At the tender age of 36, he has managed to not only rise to preeminence in his original coverage of music (at Spin Magazine), but has also risen meteorically in the sports world, writing for ESPN. With these accomplishments alone, he has become the de facto poet laureate of his home state of North Dakota. Or perhaps it is boredom, an exhaustion with a seemingly conquered field. Once you’ve covered Gilbert Arenas, philosophical quandaries, and Billy Joel in the same collection of essays, the question, “Now what?” becomes much more tangible.

Whatever the reason, this first fictional foray does not start well. Even before the page numbers begin, we read the following disclaimer on the dedication: “This story is a non-autobiographical work of fiction.” For the author of Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, this notice seems unnecessarily constricting; as it were, it is actually overcompensating.

The story takes place in Owl, North Dakota, a town with a population “around eight hundred. Maybe eight fifty.” Klosterman, of course, grew up in Wyndmere, North Dakota, a town with a population of 533. We follow the paths of three, largely unrelated characters — Mitch, a high-school football player; Julia, a high-school teacher who comes from out-of-town; and Horace, the seventy-three year-old townie.

In spite of these widely diverse perspectives, it is the same voice — Klosterman’s — that keeps coming to the surface. Mitch, who never listens to rock music and is generally a slacker, observes that, “Society is so confused . . . . Everyone wanted to become the person they were already pretending to be.” Heavy stuff for a third-string quarterback in the rural North. When describing the thoughts of local football hero Vance Druid: “My vanity conflicts me. My problems are clichéd and predictable.” Then, there are the culture references, peppered throughout the book as are his essays. Most obnoxious of these references, however, are those that are completely divorced from Owl. For instance, “There were multiple conversations happening at the same time; it was like an Altman film, although nobody inside the car had ever seen an Altman film.” Later, we get, “Inside her skull, words and sentences sounded like side three of Metal Machine Music, an album she had never heard of.” By the end, we can’t tell who is the subject — Klosterman or the characters. It is, to use Klosterman’s vernacular, like an Aphex Twin cover.

So it is natural that it is the implicit narration, where the author is indubitably the voice speaking, that the writing really resonates. Without the baggage of character development and inner thoughts, Klosterman’s inimitable prose is allowed to flourish. This, perhaps, is why his brief sketches of minor townies resonate more than the main characters. Take, for example, Rebecca Grooba:

There were twenty-two juniors in the room. Twenty-one of them had never even seen the cover of Moby-Dick, so they remained silent out of necessity. The twenty-second junior, Rebecca Grooba, had read Moby-Dick in sixth grade. She remained silent by choice, just as she had (and just as she would) for the duration of every class she ever took (or would take) during her thirteen years inside the rectangular classrooms of Owl public school. During that thirteen-year span, Revecca Grooba would never score less than 94 on any scholastic examination, except for one 67 on an extra-credit trigonometry test that no one else was able to attempt . . . . She understood how isotopes operated before she knew what isotopes were. She could count cards and memorize Social Security numbers. As an eighth grader, she read Finnegans Wake over Christmas vacation and scrawled the digits “1132″ on her Earth Science notebook. No one asked why she did this. Rebecca Grooba was a genius; everyone in Owl knew it, but hardly anyone cared. She was so shy that she wasn’t even unpopular. Over time, her wordless brilliance became routine, and then it became boring. People quit noticing.

In 1988, Rebecca Grooba would become a registered nurse.

In those last nine words, Klosterman captures so much of the snow-dusted spirit of the rural North, a sentiment expressed in a much different light when discussing the mascot controversy of the 1960s: “But — nonetheless, and more importantly — there has not been any major community controversy since the late sixties. Things have been perfect ever since, if by ‘perfect’ you mean ‘exactly the same.’”

It is in these passages and those like them that Klosterman comes close to something real, to sociology told with a storyteller’s gift. It is these moments, these journalistic moments, where insight is reached. Yet by forcing the work to be fiction, Klosterman has muddled the damn thing. Instead of letting his voice flourish, and being forthright about his home state, he has dabbled in using fiction as a veil, with marionettes for characters. We can only hope that his next work is classified in the “non-fiction” section.