War by Sebastian Junger

The author of The Perfect Storm embedded himself with an Army platoon fighting in a remote and barren valley in Afghanistan. 

(Twelve, 287 pages, $26.99)

You’d have to go back more than 50 years to find a better book about combat than Sebastian Junger’s War, said Philip Caputo in The Washington Post. The author of 1997’s The Perfect Storm shared “the terror, monotony, misery, comradeship, and lunatic excitement” of a bloody 15-month tour with an Army platoon in remotest Afghanistan, and made it his task to simply show what war at ground level feels like. He succeeds splendidly, rendering the battlefield experience so exactly that it may feel to civilian readers as alien as “a planet in some distant solar system.”

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