His reactions to what is happening around him help put the reader inside (and outside) that wire. The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.Īs it turns out, some of the best, most eye-opening parts of WAR (and there are many of them) are the ones in which Junger is, in fact, the least objective. They urinate in PVC pipes and shower once a week in water pumped from a local creek. Their days are spent bent over shovels out in the heat, filling 25-ton Hescos with rock and sand, or patrolling steep, rocky hillsides under the crushing weight of 80-pound packs. Its defenders, the combat infantry soldiers of the 173rd Airborne’s Battle Company, second platoon, live for the majority of their 15-month deployment without electricity, running water or hot meals. OP Restrepo, the construction and defense of which Sebastian Junger ( The Perfect Storm) chronicles in his powerful new book, WAR (and its accompanying documentary film, Restrepo), is little more than a hovel built from sandbags and tarps there are sturdier dwellings under bridges in Central Park. footholds in the Korengal Valley, a six-mile gash in the “axle-breaking, helicopter-crashing, spirit-killing, mind-bending terrain” near the country’s eastern border. But not if you’re talking about Afghanistan, and not if the year is 2007, and not if you’re talking about the tenuous U.S. To a civilian reader, the word “outpost,” at least insofar as the modern American military is concerned, might connote some level of permanence or structure, or at least a little bit of brick-and-mortar security.
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