Kirkus Reviews QR Code WAR by Sebastian Junger   By Sebastian
Junger  Pub Date: May 11th, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-446-55624-8
Publisher: Twelve  The latest flexing of journalistic muscle
from Vanity Fair contributor Junger (A Death in Belmont, 2006,
etc.).  The author dives into the most perilous form of
immersion journalism, attempting to create an unflinching
account of frontline combat. The prototype of this approach is
Michael Herr’s peerless Dispatches (1977), a thoroughly
unsentimental, grunt-level view of the Vietnam War’s bloodiest
years. Yet if Junger’s dispatches from the fighting in
Afghanistan solidify anything, it’s that war American-style
hasn’t evolved much in the decades since Herr’s book. It seems
that neither advanced tactics nor postmillennial weapons
technology have negated the all-too-human imperfections of face-
to-face ground combat. From June 2007 to June 2008, Junger was
embedded—“entirely dependent on the U.S. military for food,
shelter, security, and transportation”—with the 173rd Airborne,