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Writer Offers A Sense Of Life In War-Torn Iraq

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By GEORGE MEYER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 19, 2008

"The Forever War," by Dexter Filkins (Knopf, $25)

What with government stonewalling and the withering of international news gathering, our views of the Iraq war have been spotty, jingoistic or well-spun.

And with even Hollywood failing to produce many successfully compelling stories from the Middle East, our clearest views of the war have come from books. From the pages of such titles as "Fiasco" and "Descent Into Chaos," we've learned most of what we know about one of our nation's longest conflicts and its management by our most inept administration.

So it's with some relief to read "The Forever War," a very human memoir by international correspondent Dexter Filkins that tries to make sense of nearly five years in the Mideast from the ground up. Filkins, a University of Florida graduate and former correspondent for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, doesn't concern himself with details of the war's management.

That doesn't mean some well-known names don't creep into his explanation of life in wartime Iraq. Most rewarding are brief peeks at a preoccupied Paul Bremer and an enigmatic, silky Ahmad Chalabi.

Prior to 2003 Iraq, in nearby Afghanistan, Filkins found himself in a war fought between constantly changing sets of allegiances. Afghans inured to decades of fighting often switched sides simply to accommodate whoever had power in an area. As one soldier put it, "Yesterday, my enemy. Today, my brother."

That sort of patriotism didn't make life easy a few years later for National Guardsmen from Middle America. Filkins writes simply but eloquently about how 19- and 20-year-olds from places such as Texas tried to parse such thinking and make headway following orders from others who understood even less.

Identify the enemy? Filkins offers a list of insurgent groups claiming responsibility for attacks from May to October 2005; the list has the names of 103 separate groups.

Filkins also confides intriguing tidbits of living through the various wars. Bombs in Baghdad, for example, generally exploded before 10 a.m.; correspondents argued whether they would prefer kidnappings by Sunnis or Shiites.

"From the beginning, Iraq was a con game, with the Iraqis moving and rearranging the shells, and the Americans trying to guess which one hid the stone," Filkins writes, in a description that makes the uncertainties of Vietnam seem like schoolyard games.

Above all, Filkins makes it clear that although Americans always had to trust what Iraqis told them, the Iraqis rarely came to trust Americans. In considering their own survival, even those Iraqis who worked for Filkins' newspapers often had agendas of their own.

What's best about the book, though, is the daily efforts of Filkins and those around him to cope with living in a devastated war zone that made no sense.

Some simply retreated into the Green Zone, where U.S. forces walled themselves away from whatever trials confronted everyday Iraqis. Between assignments, Filkins maintained a jogging schedule. Often, anyone watching him jog along the Euphrates called him crazy, but it's easy to see why a ritualistic pursuit of health sliced away chunks of the surrounding unreality.

Filkins writes with spare prose, often sticking to stark, simple facts in descriptions of firefights and tense confrontations. He ends the book with various homages to gravesites and survivors he came to know.

To his credit, he helps us come to know much about life for "boots on the ground," and to appreciate the often futile nature of a conflict in which several sides battle in both certitude and ignorance.

George Meyer, a writer and communications consultant, is president of Meyer Publishing Co. of Tampa.

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