The Forever War » (Reprint)

Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Before that, he worked for the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau, and for The Miami Herald. In 2009, he was part of a team of Times reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has received a George Polk Award and two Overseas Press Club awards. Most recently, he was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. He lives in New York City.

From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgetable book that captures the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time. Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prize-winning New York Times correspondent, we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Filkins’s narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: a public amputation performed by Taliban, children frolicking in minefields, skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52’s, a night’s sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero. We venture into a torture chamber run by Saddam Hussein. We go into the homes of suicide bombers, meet Iraqi insurgents, and an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days.

Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Dexter Filkins reported from Afghanistan for the Los Angeles Times and from Iraq for The New York Times. To call him a frontline reporter would be to diminish his work; for the most part he was not embedded in the U.S. Army -- dangerous as that was -- but rather embedded in both Iraq and the United States. He went out to the villages and to the countryside, talking to tribal leaders, village elders, and all the men and women (and children) he could engage. Unlike the stud scuds of the first conflict with Iraq, secure in their rear echelon hotels, and unlike the pundits and theorists, ensconced in their Washington think tanks, Filkins learned everything he has to tell us about the wars and occupations in these lands from firsthand experience -- often near-death experiences.

Prologue: Hells Bells 3

Pt. 1 Kabul, Afghanistan, September 1998

1 Only This 13

2 Forebodings 38

3 Jang 48

Pt. 2 Baghdad, Iraq, March 2003-

4 Land of Hope and Sorrow 71

5 I Love You, March 2003 87

6 Gone Forever 95

7 A Hand in the Air 114

8 A Disease 136

9 The Man Within 149

10 Kill Yourself 168

11 Pearland 189

12 The Vanishing World 218

13 Just Talking 239

14 The Mahdi 245

15 Proteus 254

16 The Revolution Devours Its Own 272

17 The Labyrinth 281

18 Fuck Us 296

19 The Boss 307

20 The Turning 315

21 The Departed 328

Epilogue : Laika 335

Acknowledgments 343

Notes 347

Index 355