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Reading the War on Terror

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I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to understand the consequences of an event that happened when I was six, on a September Tuesday, when my mom had a haircut appointment and I saw the coverage of the deadliest terrorist attack of all time on a TV in the salon.

When I was 16, a friend of mine decided that it was time she learned what, exactly, had happened on 9/11. She earnestly described the movements of the hijackers and the falling of the towers to me as we hit the ten year anniversary of the attacks.

 For my part, I was more interested in what happened after the attacks. Sometime in high school I picked up a copy of “Way of the Knife,” about how the CIA regained its paramilitary authority during the war on terror. I’ve probably read a dozen books about America’s longest wars, not to mention books on related topics, podcasts, longform reporting, and even the odd novel. I make no claims to comprehensive knowledge, and I am sure there are excellent books out there that I have not yet read, but these are a few of the ones I found most enlightening.

  • No Good Men Among the Living – Anand Gopal

This is the only book I’ve read that centers the lives of ordinary Afghans, and it is extraordinary. Gopal follows a Taliban fighter, an Afghan official in the new government and a house wife as they make the best decisions that they can after the American invasion. Published in 2014, it presages many of the unraveling points that have played out since.

  • The Fighters — C. J. Chivers

One of the most extraordinary works of literary journalism I have read, Chivers traces the life of several service members into, out of, and through Iraq and Afghanistan. The book begins by baldly stating that the wars failed, and then proceeds to detail what that failure cost. Although Chivers was present for most of the events, and is painstakingly accurate, he never appears as a character, instead letting the troops and their friends and relatives speak for themselves.

  • The Afghanistan Papers — Craig Whitlock

Through a long running FOIA battle, Whitlock and colleagues were able to extract the largely unredacted interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. These interviews are largely with officers, removed a step or two from the battle front but closer to the ground than the policy makers in Washington; the middle management of the war. This perspective particularly highlights the systemic policy failures of the war.

  • Reign of Terror — Spencer Ackerman

I have written previously on this block about Ackerman’s book, and refer readers to it, but it really is the best overview of the war at home and its impact on American politics.

  • The Guantanamo Diary — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The Guantanamo Diary lays out what it is like to live under America’s peculiar imprisonment for terror suspects, carved out of a naval base in a legal black hole. The Diary is an extraordinary book, and essential for anyone trying to understand the consequences of America’s embrace of torture and indefinite detention.

Reflections: “How the Word is Passed”

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“How the Word is Passed” is a hard book to confine to a genre. The author, Clint Smith, is a poet, journalist and academic, and all three of these disciplines shape the book. “How the Word is Passed” is a series of first-person narration of Smith’s visits to sites marked by American slavery — Virginia and Texas, New York and Senegal, from presidential mansions to confederate graveyards.

Smith’s lexicon is a poet’s: ambulances do not pass or wail, they maze through streets, “howling a loud and urgent incantation.” His practice, though, falls into the journalistic and academic. As lyrical as his word choices can be, the interactions are precise. He makes careful observations of people’s appearance and quotes them at length — documented on a digital recorder, he tells the reader early, his methodology and the circumstance of all his interviews is explained throughout. These interactions are contextualized with writings from Du Boise, Confederate documents, the words of the formerly enslaved. Where necessary in the text he includes footnotes, and to supplement he has pages of notation on sourcing at the end.

Smith is no passive observer – he documents his own thoughts just as carefully as those of his interviewees, including when he disputes what they are saying.  The book feels as personal as it is poetic, especially the concluding interviews with Smith’s own grandparents. At the same time, for all the lyricism and reflection, the book feels spare and exact. Perhaps this is, in part, because Smith lets his subjects speak for themselves. While he makes it clear when he disagrees with them, he still gives them ample to speak in their own voices. There is also a reflexive journalistic fairness throughout, he frequently gives those who disagree with his interviewees a right of reply.The result is a book that is personal without feeling like the author privileges his own perspective.

This space creates an invitation for the reader to explore further. It lays out slices of the modern world inextricably shaped by America’s national sin and says, this is what I observed. Now look for yourself.