From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable book that captures, in stunning vignettes, snapshots, and episodes, the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time.

New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins's work in Iraq was hailed by David Halberstam as "reporting of the highest quality imaginable." Now, through Filkins's eyes, we witness the chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, led to the attacks of 9/11, and culminated in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Filkins's "camera" moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public amputation performed by Taliban; the days and nights of 9/11 rescue workers. He takes us inside the homes of suicide bombers and into street-to-street combat alongside a battalion of U.S. Marines in Falluja. We meet Iraqi insurgents; an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days; Ahmed Chalabi, who tricked America into war; and Ahmed Shah Masoud, the anti-Taliban rebel killed by Al Qaeda.

Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of the war on terror and of the experiences of the people involved, combatants and victims alike. It is a stunning debut: a brilliant, fearless book about one war and, ultimately, about all war.

"Filkins, a New York Times prize — winning reporter, is widely regarded as among the finest war correspondents of this generation. His richly textured book is based on his work in Afghanistan and Iraq since 1998. It begins with a Taliban-staged execution in Kabul. It ends with Filkins musing on the names in a WWI British cemetery in Baghdad. In between, the work is a vivid kaleidoscope of vig-nettes. Individually, the strength of each story is its immediacy; together they portray a theater of the absurd, in which Filkins, an extraordinarily brave man, moves as both participant and observer. Filkins does not editorialize — a welcome change from the punditry that shapes most writing from these war zones. This book also differs essentially from traditional war correspondence because of its universal empathy, feelings enhanced by Filkins's spare prose. Saudi women in Kabul airport, clad in burqas and stylish shoes, bemoan their husbands' devotion to jihad. An Iraqi casually says to his friend, 'Let's go kill some Americans.' A marine is shot dead escorting Filkins on a photo opportunity. Iraqi soldiers are disconcerted when he appears in running shorts ('They looked at [my legs] in horror, as if I were naked'). Carl von Clausewitz said 'war is a chameleon.' In vividly illustrating the varied ways people in Afghanistan and iraq have been affected by ongoing war, Filkins demonstrates that truth in prose. 5 photos. (Sept. 17)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The Forever War" is a splendid volume of short nonfiction pieces about two dozen incidents of war in Iraq and Afghanistan between 1998 and 2006. Dexter Filkins previously covered several of these events in news articles for the New York Times, where he is a correspondent. He has now reworked his material, sculpting each story so that it shines as a work of literature, illuminating the human cost of... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) war.

Writing as an observer in some stories and a protagonist in others, Filkins focuses on how violence reveals character, including his own. The book is not arranged chronologically; it is a journalist's snapshots of war's effects. The preamble cites Melville: "Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free." In that vein, the stories have a haunting fickleness; characters don't get what they deserve but what war chooses to dispense. An Iraqi doctor fires an AK-47 to stop looters from entering his hospital. A Jordanian father flips through photos of his dead son, wondering how "an English-speaking, American-loving, hair-gel-wearing lawyer who'd walked among the bikinis of Santa Monica" came to blow himself up in a suicide attack in Iraq. Filkins and Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi tour a modern art collection in Tehran, wandering alone past works by Degas, Warhol and Chagall.

"The Forever War" is akin to Michael Herr's "Dispatches," published in 1977. But in my view, "Dispatches" is a conceited, self-centered book; in Vietnam, journalists lavishly praised fellow journalists for their courage and understanding of war, as if they were better-trained, more insightful and more valorous than the infantrymen. Many reporters made themselves the center of the action, using U.S. soldiers as props. Spurning such narcissism, Filkins expresses empathy for the grunts in Iraq.

Yet he stands apart from them. When he first got to Iraq, Filkins apparently was determined not to take sides. Iraq "wasn't my war, not my army," he writes. At one point in "The Forever War," a Marine tells Filkins to keep his mouth shut because he is "not part of this unit." During the 2004 battle for Fallujah, however, the author's tone changes. He stops writing about "them" and starts writing about "us." "We had become part of the team," he declares. "I knew they would save me if I got into trouble." And, in fact, they did. A Marine, Lance Cpl. William L. Miller, 22, of Pearland, Tex., was killed while escorting him to the top of a minaret in Fallujah, an incident recounted in "Pearland," the finest story in this collection.

On the other hand, insurgents did not try to kill Filkins when he was living in Baghdad, causing him to wonder about his journalistic detachment. "The insurgents knew where to find us. ... So why did they let us live?" he writes. "I assumed they had decided that we were useful to them." The notion of being useful to al-Qaeda was "not a comforting thought," he adds. After all, a U.S. platoon had stood by him and paid a tragic price for doing so. Iraq wasn't his war, but it was his army.

In many of these stories, Filkins depicts loss and grief uncompensated by accomplishment. To him, it seems, war is sound and fury, signifying nothing except pathos and irony. And that point of view, common in academia, is part of a larger problem. Reviewers in cliquish fashion praise books by reporters while ignoring the writing of warriors like former Staff Sgts. Michael Yon and David Bellavia, who balance war's ugliness with its purpose. Now that violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically, the war has fallen off the front pages without anyone adequately explaining how our troops turned it around. Because journalists and editors shape the public's view, Iraq is likely to be perceived not just as the forever war but as the forever-lost war.

Filkins' singular skill in this book rests in showing how war shatters lives and how some people manage to survive amid fear, violence, intrigue and chaos. He does not describe the intricacies of combat or strategy; his book is not a history of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, he shows us the oleaginous manipulations of men like Chalabi, who served for a year as Iraq's deputy prime minister; the Dark Ages cruelty of Taliban warlords; the shrink-wrapped self-importance of such high-level U.S. officials as Ambassador Paul Bremer; and the instinctive, unassuming valor of grunts like Lance Cpl. Miller.

These stories are accurate but not antiseptic, detached but not uncaring. And they force the reader to reflect on how fragile civilization is and how fortunate we Americans are.

Reviewed by Bing West, who fought as a Marine in Vietnam, served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and is the author, most recently, of 'The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq.', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Stunning...it is not facetious to speak of work like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the 'culture' of a war...This unforgettable narrative [represents]...a haunting spiritual witness that will make this volume a part of this awful war's history." Robert Stone, The New York Times Book Review

"Dexter Filkins's The Forever War, brutally intimate, compassionate, often poetic accounts of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, is destined to become a classic." Vanity Fair

"Dexter Filkins has seen the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan; he has stood in the ruins of the World Trade Center; he has been in the heat of battle in Iraq; indeed, no one else has been closer to the action than this courageous and thoughtful observer. This is a sensational book in the best sense." Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

"The Forever War is already a classic — it has the timeless feel of all great war literature. A lot has been written about Iraq and Afghanistan, but no one has seen as much, survived as much, and registered the horror with such sad eloquence as Dexter Filkins. His combination of courage and sensitivity is so rare that books like his come along only once every major war. This one is ours." George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

"[A] litany of war's savage absurdity...Filkins writes with candor and clarity....Sharing his deeply humbling, transforming journey, the author tempers numbing details of slaughter and carnage with affecting human stories." Kirkus Reviews

"Filkins...marshals his broad experience to present a wide-ranging view of this struggle, told through a series of intense, vivid, and startling vignettes....A portrait of the difficulty, complexity, and savagery of a conflict that will be with us for some time." Booklist

"[An] extraordinary work of exorcism... like a pointillist Seurat, a neo-Impressionist juxtaposition of spots of pure color with black holes and open wounds." John Leonard, Harper's

"The work Filkins accomplishes in The Forever War is one of the most effective antitoxins that the writing profession has produced to counter the administration's fascinating contemporary public relations tactic." New York Times

"Much has been written about these wars....Probably less has been written from the ground up to the broken rooftops where so much of the fighting has been waged. And rarely has it been conveyed with the detail and tenacity of The Forever War." Minneapolis Star Tribune

Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Before that, he worked for the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper's New Delhi bureau, and for The Miami Herald. He has been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a winner of a George Polk Award and two Overseas Press Club awards. Most recently, he was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.