EVERY war has its own culture. Somebody seems to be winning, someone else losing, but often the important consequences of a wartime situation are not the direct results of decisions in the theater of operations. Many people die; families, marriages and cities are destroyed. Things that seem manifest at the time leave people within the next half-century wondering about the delusions and miscalculations that set hordes of men and machines into action, that send so many ardent young people to the grave, along with innocent civilian populations. One of the oldest constant contributing elements of a conflict's cultural ambience has been the interpretive prose of correspondents. It is not facetious to speak of work like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the “culture” of a war. The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing started serves us well. You might call the work of enlightening and guiding a deliberately misguided public during its time of need a cultural necessity. The work Filkins accomplishes in “The Forever War” is one of the most effective antitoxins that the writing profession has produced to counter the administration's fascinating contemporary public relations tactic. The political leadership's method has been the dissemination of facts reversed 180 degrees toward the quadrant of lies, hitherto a magic bullet in their never-ending crusade to accomplish everything from stealing elections to starting ideological wars. Filkins uses the truth as observed firsthand to detail an arid, hopeless policy in an unpromising part of the world. His writing is one of the scant good things to come out of the war. Filkins opens “The Forever War” with a prologue describing the attack on the Sunni fortress of Falluja by the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. Embedded (and how) with Bravo Company, Filkins shares the deadly risks of street fighting in a hostile city in which the company, commanded by an outstanding officer, takes its objective and also a harrowing number of casualties. The description makes us understand quite vividly how we didn't want to be there and also makes ever so comprehensible the decision by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to give our last excursion into Asia a pass. (“Bring 'em on!” said the president famously about this one.) Filkins had been covering the Muslim world for years before the invasion of Iraq, and is one of The New York Times's most talented reporters. He employs a fine journalistic restraint, by which I mean he does not force irony or paradox but leaves that process to the reader. Nor does he speculate on what he does not see. These are worthy attributes, and whether their roots are in journalistic discipline or not they serve this unforgettable narrative superbly. Someone, Chesterton it may have been, identified the sense of paradox with spirituality. Though Filkins does not rejoice in paradoxes, he never seems to miss one either, and the result is a haunting spiritual witness that will make this volume a part of this awful war's history. He entitles his section on Manhattan “Third World,” and he leaves us feeling that the history he has set down here will not necessarily feature in our distant cultural recollections but may rather be history – the thing itself – come for us at last.-New York Times – Robert Stone is the author of the novel “Dog Soldiers,” set during the Vietnam War. His most recent book is “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.” __
