Sarah Gold

The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
June 20, 2008

What’s in My Bookbag: The Forever War (Knopf, Sept. 17). New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins’s account of his time as a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq promises to be one of the year’s major books on America’s war on terror. It could be the Imperial Life in the Em-erald City of the fall season. PW’s review will appear in the June 30 issue.

Whether going through the detritus at the  bombed-out al-Qaeda camp in Tora Bora (“I picked up a paperback book with seared pages that was the size of the New York phone book. It was Al-Qaeda’s training manual, written in Arabic”) or being hurried away from a roadside cafe by his driver in Iraq’s Sunni triangle (“Some people in the parking lot were talk-ing about killing you”), Filkins’s writing is beautifully observed and terrifyingly precise.

Here is a little taste—a chilling account of one of Filkins’s first experiences in Kabul in 1998:

“One morning I was standing amid the blown-up storefronts and the broken buildings of Jadi Maiwand, the main shopping street before it became a battlefield, and I was trying to take it in when I suddenly had the sensation one sometimes feels in the tropics, believing that a rock is moving, only to discover it is a reptile perfectly camouflaged. They were crawling out to greet me: legless men, armless boys, women in tents. Children without teeth. Hair stringy and matted.

Help us, they said.”

Read it and weep-- for Afghanistan, for Iraq, and for anyone who has had to witness such devastation..

Posted by Sarah Gold on June 20, 2008 | Comments (0)