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Review: “War” is about the 18-month placement Sebastian Junger got with Battle Company in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Battle Company, 150 men, see 20% of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. 150 men out of hundreds of thousands! This is because of the Korengal Valley, the most dangerous area in this region. The mountains border Pakistan and many of the Taliban fighters come across from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

There are a number of things that strike you about the men in Battle Company. How they all come from disparate backgrounds for instance. One guy joins because he heard a radio advert while working in Subway, quit his job, and joined the army the next day. 6 months later here he is firing off machine gun rounds and calling down air strikes in a valley thousands of miles away! One man used to deal drugs in Reno, crossed some drug dealers, and joined the army to escape them. Another, perhaps the most interesting, O’Byrne, joined after being sent to reform school for taking the rap for his dad shooting him!

The other thing that strikes you about them is their loyalty to one another. They really care about each other and look out for one another like nobody else, anywhere else. It’s a close-knit group that honours their dead and loyalty to their unit. Even when they’re on leave, they race back to the front as they don’t want to be responsible for not being there if one of them dies. When Doc Restrepo dies, their name the camp after him and fight the Taliban like animals, going out into the valley just to draw fire, then calling down Apaches to bomb the positions.

The book is about the soldier’s life in this valley and as such violence suffuses the book. From the numerous encounters with the enemy (often with Junger caught up in the middle), to the casualties they inflict and absorb, it is inescapable. One-man grills cheesesteaks and then when he calls out that dinner’s ready an RPG takes his arm off! One man is shot in his leg while asleep in his hammock – if he had been sleeping in his normal position the bullet would have gone in his head. When a new lieutenant joins the unit, the men hold him down and beat him up. In any other part of the army this would be mutiny but here they do it to gauge his reaction – if he takes the punishment then they will listen and respect him; if he can’t, he’s failed the initiation.

It’s a brutal world these men live in and the stakes are high. Junger reports all of this with clarity and skill, knowing how to bring the reader into this barely recognisable world and making them understand how these men live day to day. It’s fascinating, exciting, absorbing, and an utterly brilliant book, I can’t recommend it higher.

Sebastian Junger is the New York Times bestselling author of War, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and A Death in Belmont. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the Academy Award-nominated film Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He lives in New York City.