Dexter Filkins jumped ship at the New York Times last year, and is now reporting for the New Yorker from Turkey. I have to imagine he got a pretty good offer from the magazine, because there seems only so much width to report on war and global conflict there vs. his former employer. Or maybe even the most blistered of war reporters finally had enough of living in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq for well over a decade and decided to head in a new direction.
I won’t lie - I have a crush on Mr. Filkins. After I read The Forever War back in 2009, I sent him a message, to which he promptly replied. I thanked him on behalf of our small military family, for portraying a humanistic slice of war and its outlying effects on a greater mass than just the immediate people it touches.
The book starts in late 90’s Afghanistan, as he bears witness to a public hanging, and ends with him running through the streets of tony Cambridge, Massachusetts, a long way from Ramadi, Baghdad, Kabul and all the sources of his work for so many years. He talks of being a stranger in America, and feeling very at home among war zones, in the same way many men and women grapple with the difference between “there” and “here.”
This book is a modern classic on war in the 21st century. In his brief description of 9/11, he says a volume in just three and a half pages. Living across the Hudson River in Hoboken at the time, no civilians (including journalists, blood donors, family members of victims, etc.) were allowed into a port of Manhattan except emergency personnel. Through reporter’s persuasion, he hopped a ferry and camped overnight in the burned out recesses of the Brooks Brothers that was once housed below the World Trade Center. Prior to staking out his spot for the evening, he eyes a set of intestines on the ground, talks to local fireman who aren’t yet aware of the greater damages they’ve yet to face, and observes the destruction he isn’t used to seeing in his own country.
Walking in, watching the flames shoot upward, the first thing I thought was that I was back in the Third World. My countrymen were going to think this was the worst thing that ever happened, the end of civilization. In the Third World, this sort of thing happened every day: earthquakes, famines, plagues…Seventeen thousand died in the earthquake in Turkey. In Afghanistan, in the earthquake there, four thousand. This was mass murder, that was clear, it was an act of evil. Though I’d seen that, too: the forty thousand dead in Kabul. I don’t think I was the only person thinking this, who had the darker perspective. All those street vendors who worked near the World Trade Center, from all those different countries, selling falafel and schwarma. When they heard the planes and watched the towers they must have thought the same as I did: that they’d come home.
The title is in reference to the wars that never end in Afghanistan, the wars the never end among nations, and the ones that never end in ourselves, as he gives an intimate face to the Taliban warlords, the American marines embedded there, the women of Iraq and Afghanistan, the children. For the small percentage of us who have experienced war up close and personal since the beginning, this book was a salve in a sea of isolation. Filkins gets it.
At the end of his acknowledgements, he says:
I fared better than many of the people I wrote about in this book; yet even so, over the course of the events depicted here, I lost the person I cared for most. The war didn’t get her; it got me.
Check out his most recent piece in the New Yorker, Will Civil War Hit Afghanistan. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/09/120709fa_fact_filkins
