James Delingpole reviews Sebastain Junger's book War.Here’s Z Company of the Fusiliers: ‘The major was hit again and again — in the head, the arm, the backside — but continued fighting. “Christ I’ve been hit in the arse!” a Fusilier yelled. “I’ve got one in the arse too,” Winn roared back. “Keep cracking!” The “big man”, Crooks, standing without cover on the ridge, firing a Bren from the hip, was shot through the chest. He somersaulted off the ridge and into a tree; another Fusilier killed the sniper. Crooks was patched up and resumed firing from a prone position…’.
This is war porn at its finest, all the more delicious for being totally true. I don’t believe there’s a man alive who can read this sort of stuff without wishing he’d been there — and then come out in one piece. It’s the ‘come out in one piece’ part, of course, which rather scuppers that fantasy. But oh to have been there and done that. You could climb Mt Everest, write a book that sold a million, shag your favourite supermodel, become prime minister, and still it wouldn’t even come close to having fought and survived an action like that.
Of course, one generally gets frowned on for saying such things, because, as we know, war is hell and nothing good ever comes of it. This is what’s so wonderfully refreshing about Sebastian Junger’s compulsive new book
War. Unlike me, Junger has ‘seen the elephant’. His book — about war, in case the title left you wondering — is the result of five trips to perhaps the most dangerous spot in the entire Afghanistan war, the Korengal Valley, where he risked his life at a remote forward operating base with the men of Battle Company of the Rock Battalion of 173rd Airborne brigade.
His conclusion? That the high you get from intense combat is like nothing else on earth. ‘Combat is such an adrenaline rush,’ one soldier confides to him. ‘People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that’s not true… we drink because we miss the good stuff.’
So far, so obvious. But where it gets really interesting is when Junger analyses what it is that men of his platoon secretly most desire. What they crave, he reckons, is not an encounter where they trash the opposition and slaughter them in droves, but rather one such as has happened at two US outposts in Afghanistan — Ranch House and Combat Outpost Kahler — where the position is overrun by a merciless enemy attacking in overwhelming force and they have to fight to the death.
And the reason for this is not that they like their fighting to be as violent as possible (though they do, of course, like that too: any opportunity to go ‘cyclic’ on their SAWs) — but because it affords them the chance of making the ultimate sacrifice for buddies who, they’re fully aware, would do the same for them. As Ian McEwan wrote after 9/11, adapting Philip Larkin: ‘What survives of us is love.’ What Junger shows is that it’s as true in the heat of combat as it is in peace. Men fight, not for their country or for their cause (of which they often know precious little), but for their mates.
‘The defence of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea and once you’ve been exposed to it there’s almost nothing else you’d rather do,’ says Junger. Not since his first world war namesake Ernst, I think, has any writer got closer to the dark, terrible but strangely touching secret of why it is that men so love war.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/all/6069963/men-fight-for-their-mates-it-is-the-secret-of-why-they-so-love-war.thtml
