I generally give more credence to book recommendations from people I actually know versus professional bloggers or reviewers, but, after reading a particularly convincing recommendation for this book, I decided to give it a go. After all, it’s easier for me to put down a nonfiction book if I don’t like it than fiction.
But as Miles says in his recommendation, “I dare you to read the seven-page prologue… and then put this book down.” You can’t do it, not if you have any interest in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq whatsoever.
Because Dexter Filkins is a writer, I expected a certain level of competency. Filkins actually accomplishes something more. As Miles says, the book turns out more primary source document than reportage. Filkins doesn’t include only what he witnesses, but also what he is involved in, from the soldier who died leading him and a photographer to a story to the Iraqis he hired to bring him stories when it was too difficult for him to leave the Times’ house. The book would be hollow without these sections, and I commend him for writing about experiences that must have been difficult.
I was happy to read a bit about how being in Iraq affected him. I loved his bits about running through Tigris River Park, in the months after it was rehabbed by the Americans, and after it fell into disrepair. In these moments he discusses the numbness he felt during the rest of his time in Baghdad, how he had originally felt that he would get injured, but after escaping death for seven years, he had gone numb, not thinking or even caring about his own well-being.
He also relates reading an email from a soldier’s mother who talked about her love for him, and how when the soldier read that email he had to keep himself from smiling, though his buddies ragged on him. And how, after her son returned home, another mother had to sleep in bed with her son to wake him from violent nightmares.
There are also so many harrowing bits. Filkins wasn’t just in Iraq, he was embedded, in the most literal sense. He lived outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, he traveled with marines when they took back Fallujah, and he flitted from Iraq to Iran with Chalabi. He met insurgent leaders and the head of CIA in Baghdad, parents who’d lost children and families run out of neighborhoods to Jordan or Syria or America.
All of these experiences would be moot without the writing, without the feeling. Filkins may have been numb while he lived in Baghdad, but it’s clear he was able to recover some humanity in writing the book.
One of my favorite sections is in chapter 2, a miniature essay called “Third World” about Filkins’s experience on September 11 at Ground Zero. It’s three and a half pages. It’s unlike anything else I’ve read about 9/11. He writes about seeing the empty beds in the temporary hospitals on Canal Street; he doesn’t have to say why they weren’t used. He talks about his walk to Ground Zero; he had to take a long way around because of all the police keeping people out, but as he approached the scene it was so quiet; “It was as if all the sound had been pulled into the hole in the ground a little farther up.” The first bit of debris he noticed was a “gray-green thing” – a bit of a person’s intestine – and he marvels about the human mind’s ability to pick out human flesh amidst so much waste.
And my favorite image in the entire book:
Above me stood one of the airplane landing struts, maybe thirty feet high, snapped off and lying at an angle in the street, looking like the collapsed wing of some enormous bird. The tire was still filled with air.
Those two sentences broke my heart. I experienced them in a different way than I think I’ve experienced anything 9/11-related in the last eleven years. Broadcasts and newspapers, they make me numb. I freeze at the image of the falling towers. But these sentences made me feel again.
In the third paragraph of the essay, he talks about how, looking toward lower Manhattan, he 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 ever day.
I think that this new perspective, from someone who has seen disasters – natural and manmade – all over the world, is what really affected me about this essay. Filkins wasn’t just another American witness; his experiences widen the scope of human suffering, illuminate a world in which things like 9/11 happen all the time. And this lens widening, it doesn’t have to end with Filkins’s experience. What about Hurricane Katrina? The earthquake in Haiti? The tsunami in Indonesia? Or ethnic cleansing in Germany, the Balkans, Africa? This essay puts 9/11 in perspective, and while I think it’s important for Americans to remember it, I also think it’s important for us not to forget the rest of the world’s suffering.
I think the book as a whole approaches this idea as well. It forces readers to contend with Afghanistan before and after 9/11, and with Iraq during and after the 2003 invasion. It forces us to put all of these events on a plane of human suffering and to face the fact that, while we have suffered, we have caused others – the innocent and the guilty, the good and the evil, the domestic and the foreign – to suffer as well. And was it worth it? And should we consider that next time?
The only criticism I have is that some of the chapters blended together for me, in that I wasn’t sure when I was. Filkins was very good about describing where we were – Fallujah, Baghdad, Samarra – but I wasn’t sure that he presented everything chronologically. I think a lot of this came from the variation of turmoil throughout Iraq; each city, sometimes each neighborhood, went through different periods of calm versus war. Filkins traveled extensively and was clearly intimately acquainted with these places, and his deep knowledge might have muddied the timeline. I didn’t think, overall, that it took away from my reading experience.
Final verdict: 5 Stars
50twobooks 