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Nonfiction

On the Ground in Afghanistan and Iraq

A wounded Naval officer shielded by soldiers, Kunduz, Afghanistan, 2010.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

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THE FIGHTERS
Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq
By C. J. Chivers
374 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.

C. J. Chivers, a senior writer for The New York Times and a former Marine infantry officer, begins his new book with a description of an American weapon, equipped with GPS sensors and a guidance system, hitting “precisely the wrong place” and killing and mutilating a family of women and children on the Afghan steppe as a consequence. But Chivers’s narrative has only begun to slam you in the gut; later on, the author captures the psychological effect the errant bomb has on the Marines at the scene. Indeed, because of the way the stories and characters spool into one another with mathematical intensity, and the second-by-second in-your-face descriptions of prolonged battles from a sergeant’s eye view, “The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq” could be the most powerful indictment yet of America’s recent Middle East wars.

Chivers is interested in the chemistry between platoons and companies, not that between battalions and brigades: In other words, this is a book about the lower ranks who experience the thing itself, the gut-wrenching violence and confusion of war — history from the ground up, not from the top down, precisely what Washington elites miss. “The Fighters” constitutes an illusion-free zone, where the concrete triumphs over the abstract, where the best and most indelible of those profiled, from that vast working-class heart of the country, begin their military service in a blaze of patriotism following 9/11, and end up confused, cynical, betrayed and often disfigured or dead.

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Of course, all wars are messy in the bloodiest and worst ways. What can redeem them for the combatants is only strategy, so that their ordeals contain a larger purpose within a realistic context. But in the background of this book is the very absence of such strategy, not only on the larger political level but on the microlevel, too: missions, one after the other, that even the grunts can see make no sense at all.

In the author’s telling, the American footprint in Afghanistan grows over the years from a sensible light-and-lethal affair to a mushrooming network of urban blast-barrier mazes of soldiers and Marines, even as the purpose of the war becomes completely lost. Specialist Robert Soto, an old man still in his teens, “had joined the Army to protect America. He was unsure how the Korengal Outpost” — in northeastern Afghanistan — “served that end. The circumstances in the valley, and many of the missions his platoon was ordered to perform, caused him to wonder what the Army was thinking. … Soto reduced the mission to its most basic rationale, We’re here because we’re here. If nothing else, the soldiers could fight for one another.”

What makes this book such a classic of war reporting is the very absence of panorama. Rather, Chivers has reconstructed the moment-by-moment experiences of Navy corpsmen, helicopter pilots, soldiers and Marines at their most narrow and fundamental level. Minutes become hours and eat up breathless spells of 20 and more pages at a stretch. Soto, in the instant before battle, when there is often the click-on-click of metal coming from the automatic rifles, has a feeling of “absolute, intoxicating clarity.”

There are the cousins Joe Dan Worley and Dustin Kirby, hospital corpsmen from Powder Springs, Ga. Their families thought they would be safe in the Navy, but corpsmen are the medics for Marines in combat. After Worley’s first mass casualty event in Iraq, “a solemn cleanup began. The remains of six of the platoon’s Marines, the Marine driver and three Iraqi police officers were put into body bags. Worley was blood-soaked, exhausted, grieving and enraged when he arrived back” at the base. “But he knew he had done what he was supposed to do. He had found his reason for being in Iraq.” Later on, after one more harrowing combat scene, Worley himself is wounded in an I.E.D. attack. “Marines who survived bomb blasts often acted according to pattern,” Chivers explains. “First they would see if they were alive. Then they would seek their weapon. Then they would ask if their genitals were still there. … He loosened his pants. He looked. There were no apparent wounds. … Worley was rushed inside an aid station. … He felt a catheter being pushed down into his urethra.” Worley knew while drifting into unconsciousness that if he survived “he would be an amputee.”

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Soldiers mourn fallen comrades at a memorial service in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in 2012.Credit...Bryan Denton for The New York Times

While Worley loses his left leg above the knee, his cousin is even less fortunate. A handsome, unstoppable presence in battle, Kirby, who was always ministering to the wounded — he’s someone made for the movies — groggily urinates in an empty water bottle one night merely to save himself a walk to the foul portable toilets at Camp Falluja. He is punished by drawing guard duty, where he is shot in the face by the enemy. The reader meets him next some years later. “He was in constant pain and self-conscious about his appearance. He had gained 50 pounds. He was medically retired, unemployed, divorced and disfigured.”

There is no down time in this relentless book. The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky said that good poetry “should be dark with nouns” on the page. Chivers’s book is the prose equivalent, full of nouns and the simplest, least affected adjectives. It reads the way soldiers and Marines talk, so the profanity comes across as poetry. It is real and in the moment.

This history of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is replete with air battles. But there is nothing removed and sterile about them. That is because the advance of technology has provided an ancientness to fighting in the sky. Glancing at a screen while they flew, “aviators now saw their target — be it building, vehicle or man — at the moment the bombs struck.” It was like being a sniper. They literally “watched their targets die.” In particular, Chivers chronicles the exploits in Iraq of the Kiowa helicopter pilots, whose platform, unlike the Black Hawk, is lightly armored. After a bullet passed through her sole and out through her ankle, one pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Lori Hill, seeing her blood-soaked sock and foot, quips, “At least I painted my toenails.”

Even though these wars have become, at least at this juncture, a lost cause, every main character in Chivers’s account has a just-doing-my-job skill and heroism about him or her. Postmodern war, because of technology, has become complex beyond all imagining, even for the lowest infantry soldier. Thus, the troops America sent into combat between 2001 and the present have been the most skilled in our history. Chivers’s achievement has been to make his subjects mythic as well as human.

Moreover, everyone depicted is profoundly moral. Take a Navy pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Layne McDowell, who in the midst of these wars is constantly worried about whether he killed a few civilians in a bomb he dropped during the air campaign in Kosovo in 1999, even though senior officers effectively told him to put the incident out of his mind. The author’s stories give heart-rending meaning to the lives and deaths of these men and women, even if policymakers generally have not.

Robert D. Kaplan’s latest book is “The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century.” He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a senior adviser at Eurasia Group.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Confusion of War. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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