Before I can ask him a question, Dexter Filkins -- The New York Times correspondent whose new book, The Forever War, recounts experiences from his three years reporting during the Iraq War and his time before that in Afghanistan -- insists on putting one to me. He hates to ask, he says, "but have you read the book?" When we met early one evening in New York City in September, Filkins had just returned from a trip to Iraq to see how things had changed since he left in 2006. I show him my copy of his book, with post-it flags protruding from the edges of the pages, and he seems relieved.
The question, it turns out, is not entirely unwarranted. A decidedly apolitical affair, The Forever War is unlike the books on Iraq (and it is mostly about Iraq) that generate the most attention in the United States. The book studiously avoids direct engagement with the sorts of questions that have preoccupied commentators in the United States since the war in Iraq began (broadly, why and how did we get in, and how do we get out?), which may come as something of a surprise to readers who expect a book on Iraq to advance a political position or argument. But like most great books, The Forever War has a superficially modest aim that masks a much more complicated undertaking: "The hope, whether it's 10 years from now or five or 20," Filkins tells me, is that "when people ask, 'What was it like on the ground?' the book will help."
The Forever War proceeds episodically, as a series of vignettes beginning in 1998, when Filkins was in Afghanistan, and ending in 2006, when he left Iraq. Filkins' primary focus is not on questions of tactics or strategy, or on the political actors who have shaped the conditions on the ground, but on the experiences of ordinary people who have been caught up in the conflicts. The result is a book that travels widely -- through homes, streets, and alleys in Baghdad, Falluja, Ramadi and beyond -- and is tied together by an emphasis on people at the bottom of the various power structures that have sprung up in Iraq. At one point, Filkins is speaking with a college headmaster whose brother was executed during the reign of Saddam Hussein; at another, he is mingling with members of the Mahdi Army; later still, he is describing the funeral, in gut-wrenching detail, of an American soldier.
Most books about the war, Filkins told me, "have been kind of from 10,000 feet. They're broad, they make an argument, they're about policy, whether in Washington or Iraq, and so it's stuff seen from a distance." "And I experienced the war from six inches away," he continued, "so I wanted to convey some of that. I wanted to write a visceral book. I wanted to write a book about what it feels like in every way to be in the middle of something like that." The result is both stunningly good and heartrending, and the book deserves all of the effusive praise that it has received -- for its granular, evocative detail; for its impressive stylistic virtues; and, above all, for its sympathetic accounts of the Iraqi civilians and U.S. military grunts who have lost the most during the conflict.
At the same time, The Forever War provides an opportunity for an instructive, if perhaps unintended, study of how the Iraq War has been reported in American newspapers. If you have been reading The New York Times' coverage of the Iraq War, much of The Forever War will be familiar to you. Many of the events were first reported in Filkins' dispatches for the paper and in his long-form work for The New York Times Magazine. Filkins openly acknowledges this in the book, and although many passages in The Forever War bear a strong resemblance to those he used in his earlier reporting, Filkins has deftly edited and curated that work and leavened it with much that is new. But when Filkins' reporting for the Times is read alongside accounts of the same events in The Forever War, the comparisons are telling, and they speak to the limits of modern war reporting.
A.J. Liebling, the patron saint of contemporary press criticism, once observed that there are three types of writers, among which there are two types of journalists -- the reporter, "who writes what he sees," and the interpretive reporter, "who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning." This is a fairly clean analytic distinction, but the truth (as Liebling well knew) is that even ostensibly straight reporting requires interpretive choices that affect the final product and the reader, regardless of whether those choices are conscious. Some are less interesting or less overt than others -- sometimes it's a matter of how events are framed, of who gets a voice, or of which events are selected for inclusion as part of a larger story -- but rarely is an act of journalism one of mere transcription.
At the most basic level, The Forever War allows Filkins to dispense with the convention at newspapers like the Times that requires him to pretend that he does not exist as an actor in the events he describes. So, for example, The Forever War quietly confirms that when Filkins reported in the Times about a woman pleading with "an American visitor" about the looting of her home, and about liberated Iraqis trying their English "on an American visitor," and about a group of Iraqis attacking "an American reporter" in the wake of an attack on a mosque -- in every instance, the individual in question was Filkins himself. And in each case, the story is enhanced -- more intimate, more immediate -- when it comes to you in the first-person.
Part of this may simply seem stylistic, but there is a substantive dimension to the freedom for Filkins to speak in his own voice. When Filkins met Amal al-Khedairy, for instance, the woman whose house was looted, he suspected that her well-appointed home and privileged position in Baghdad's cultural elite had been acquired by cooperating with the Hussein regime. In The Forever War, we are privy to Filkins' thoughts on the matter, which provide the scene of the theft with a sense (perhaps unfair) of retributive justice:
I felt bad for Khedairy but I wondered how she had flourished under Saddam. Perhaps this was unfair, perhaps it was malicious of me, but I couldn't help but wonder. The Mukhabarat building lay just down the street. I meant to ask Khedairy, but she was lost in misery and confusion and I thought that it was perhaps not the best time to inquire.
These doubts crept into the story about Khedairy that Filkins wrote for the Times, but they were conveyed indirectly. Filkins wrote that Khedairy's "anger may seem odd in a country where people were routinely tortured to death by Saddam Hussein," and he went on to observe: "[T]he war has dragged her from a comfortable way of life under Mr. Hussein. Of the compromises involved in that, she did not speak. She had, she said, refused all invitations to join parties or committees." Filkins did not completely suppress his reservations about Khedairy; the reader just had to work a little harder to discern them.
At times, the removal of Filkins from the events he reported in the Times can seem slightly disingenuous. Consider, for instance, an episode that Filkins reported on in April 2003, several days after Thomas Smith, a Navy medical corpsman, spent the day treating Marines wounded in a firefight with Iraqi insurgents:
Today, the fighting slowed considerably, and it gave some marines a chance to catch up. Corpsman Smith, for instance, was able to use a satellite telephone to call home. In a call to his parents, he only alluded to the dangers he had faced. ''I'll have some stories when I get home,'' Corpsman Smith said. ''I love you, too, ma.''
In The Forever War, this episode is reported with additional detail, illuminating the relationship between the reporter and his subject and providing additional context for the telephone call (now from "Tommy Smith") that proved so poignant:
"I didn't think we were going to make it," he said. "They hit us with rockets. You don't know where they're coming from." Smith's voice was so gentle, and he seemed so young, that I felt moved to comfort him in the way that I would a child. I wanted to hug him, but I couldn't very well do that, so I handed him my satellite phone. It was a Saturday morning in Brooklyn. "I'll have some stories for you when I get home," Smith said into the phone. "I love you, too, Ma."
The Times would never allow this sort of detail in a news story, even though both versions of this event are "accurate," in the sense (presumably) that they convey things that are factually true. Accuracy, however, is also a matter of scale. Generally speaking, the more contextualizing facts one provides, the more accurate an account becomes. In this case, the version of the story in the Times omits not only the fact that it is Filkins, the reporter, who provided the phone that is integral to this touching scene, but also the feelings that motivate Filkins to engage in this act of generosity. All of which leads one to ask: Which is the more accurate account?
At another step removed, The Forever War provides lessons in how the construction of events -- something as elemental as how they are assembled -- can be freighted with meaning. Take Filkins' April 10, 2003 dispatch for the Times, published just a few weeks into the invasion. In it, Filkins leads with the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein and moves to the story of two men who had just been released from a Baath Party prison. Thirteen paragraphs in, Filkins notes "a muted quality to the euphoria," as evidenced by a man waiting in line for his paycheck as his office is looted, and by the ransacking of a United Nations compound. These exact same events are covered in a passage in one of the early chapters of The Forever War. But this time, their order is reversed. Where, in the Times, the scenes of looting are off-key notes in a celebratory harmony, in The Forever War the discord is at the fore -- a clear premonition of the chaos to come. One assumes that when Filkins reported these events, their prioritization reflected his view of their relative importance, but regardless of whether you think his report got the lede right, the point is that the facts in a newspaper story move through someone's mental filter, and the work of that filter has consequences, for better or worse.
Indeed, one of the strengths of The Forever War is that it allows Filkins to provide some insight into that process. Stretches of the book are given over to details that provide the backstories to his work (after Filkins witnesses one particularly brutal conflict, the marines he is accompanying kick him out because, Filkins speculates, "I'd seen something the marines did not want me to see") and that illuminate how the Times' Baghdad bureau operates (with blast walls, heavily fortified cars and, as Filkins told me, "absolutely indispensable" Iraqi employees). In some of the most poignant passages, Filkins relays the psychological toll of reporting in a war zone. "Your days may die," Filkins writes about returning to the states, "but your dreams explode." Much of this is undoubtedly a result of the carnage he witnessed, but a good deal is likely attributable to the danger he personally faced. On numerous occasions recounted in detail in The Forever War, Filkins was nearly killed in the course of his work.
When Filkins and I discussed the difference between his writing for the Times and the more thorough and intimate accounts in The Forever War, he defended the conventional newspaper style but was upbeat about the freedom to move away from it in his book. I mentioned, in particular, how he had reported on the death of a Marine in Falluja without providing the details of that death, which came about because the soldier was helping Filkins and his photographer get a picture for the newspaper. The full story is recounted in the book (and in an excerpt of the book in the Times magazine), and it is clear that the death has tormented Filkins. "I think, you know, a newspaper's a different animal than a book; it's just a different form, you know?" Filkins said. "And I think our primary purpose in the paper, obviously, is to try to inform our readers to make judgments about public life." He went on to observe that "you write in a particular way" for a newspaper. "I think it's extremely useful, and it's very, very vital, and I'm glad to be a part of it, but," Filkins continued, "in many ways, it's constricting. It just is."
There is, of course, a certain circularity to the argument that a newspaper is simply different than a book, particularly when the book mostly comprises newspaper-length dispatches. The question, really, is whether those differences are justifiable.
The Times is actually somewhat unique compared to other newspapers because it has occasionally provided space in print for its journalists in Iraq to escape the constraints of the paper's drier news style and to reflect more personally on the war. In October 2004, for instance, Filkins himself wrote about the danger to reporters in Iraq and the constraints it imposed on their work. In March 2006, Jeffrey Gettleman, who had returned to the country after a year away and at a time when President Bush was telling the American public that the Iraqis had "decided not to go to civil war," described how the violence had changed while he was gone; where previously it had been directed principally at Americans, Gettleman wrote that the violence had simply "turned inward" -- with Shiites and Sunnis killing one another -- and had become "more sadistic and less selective." Still, accounts like these have been relatively few and far between, and in almost every case, they have run in the more opinion-friendly Week in Review section, legitimizing the position (voiced by Filkins) that these stories are something different or less valuable than supposedly straightforward news pieces. That assumption is tenable, however, only to the extent that you accept the debatable proposition that reporters -- particularly those operating in an overwhelming and labyrinthine environment -- can simply be passive observers, and that there is such a thing as a just-the-facts account with no mediation from the writer.
As Filkins acknowledged when we spoke, reporters are "always informed by reporting and observations," even when they aren't writing about their thoughts. Indeed, for his part, Filkins has enjoyed the opportunities to operate outside the confines of the traditional news template. Because there have been so few reporters operating in Iraq, Filkins told me, "the vantage point that you had was so extraordinary." "It was very satisfying," he went on, "whenever I could sort of share the more subjective feelings that I had."
The barriers preventing the Times and other newspapers from further opening their pages to intimate and unvarnished writing like that in The Forever War are less logistical or creative than they are cultural and political. The form itself would not be particularly new. As journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen has noted, "'Letter from our correspondent…' is one of the oldest and most reliable forms there is for receiving intelligence from abroad." Indeed, in many ways, Filkins' writing in The Forever War harkens back to earlier forms of war reporting -- most clearly when his sympathetic, first-person accounts of time with soldiers evoke the work of Ernie Pyle in World War II. This sort of writing also need not completely replace the conventional news stories that run in newspapers. Michael Massing, another media observer who has been critical of the press for being "locked into traditional ways of telling the story," has suggested that readers would benefit if newspapers ran regular, reported columns from their journalists in Iraq. As Massing explained, "You can often communicate much more that way than in the traditional political type of story."
In fact, many of these more intimate accounts are being written by Times writers on a regular basis; they just never make it into print. The paper's fairly new Baghdad Bureau blog often features first-person reports from the Times' writers, including its Iraqi employees. The use of this digital space is laudable, but the sequestration from the print product still carries with it an implicit judgment about what is and is not appropriate for a formal news piece. (Many people still only read the Times in its print form, and the blog, while excellent, is never featured on the Times' homepage.) One unfortunate result is that the Times has obscured some of the most insightful writing about the war that has been done for the paper -- the riveting and emotional dispatches from the paper's Iraqi employees, who provide voices that are very much underrepresented in the traditional news media.
Part of the challenge of importing more overtly subjective accounts into papers like the Times may simply be institutional. Filkins gave no indication that he had been dissuaded from offering these types of stories. More likely, reporters and editors are similarly wary of stepping further into less guarded territory. But the Baghdad Bureau blog, like McClatchy's similar but less developed Inside Iraq blog, may reflect a growing comfort with the form, particularly since the editorial results have been so impressive.
More important, there has been no wave of critical sentiment alleging bias on the part of the papers' writers. The fear of losing credibility almost certainly has a great deal to do with the prevalence of the detached accounts of the war that populate our newspapers. In 2004, for instance, when a raw and personal e-mail to friends from Farnaz Fassihi, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, made its way into the public sphere, it touched off a vigorous debate about the neutrality of U.S. reporters in Iraq. Fassihi's e-mail candidly described the deteriorating conditions in Iraq, and many on the right used it as evidence that she and other U.S. journalists were opposed to the war and were providing unduly pessimistic accounts of the conditions on the ground. When I spoke with Filkins, he alluded to the concern that partisans might criticize the media if journalists wrote less guardedly, and he cited "the extraordinarily polarizing" nature of the war as part of the case for circumspection. According to him, the Times wanted to avoid having "irresponsible people run off with the things that we said." At the same time, Filkins characterized the fallout from Fassihi's e-mail as "mystifying" -- the underlying facts, after all, had been widely reported at the time -- but he acknowledged that "maybe people didn't see it or read it, and maybe it was kind of written in this kind of dry style that isn't super-palatable." In other words, the style of conventional news reporting.
The best insulation from potential charges of bias, however, is to ensure that reporters are trained and disciplined, capable of providing thoughtful, personal insights without (necessarily) offering partisan views. The work of people like Filkins demonstrates both that this is possible and that the results can be illuminating. It is, on the other hand, disingenuous to pretend that reporters are automatons -- even if it allows newspapers to avoid offending the sensibilities of some of their readers. In a way, the pretense is also an abdication of the media's most basic responsibility to deal forthrightly with their audience. It is true that pulling back the curtain may generate the appearance, to some, that reporters are biased and that their opinions adversely affect their ability to tell the truth, but as Michael Kinsley once observed in another context, "It is the job of journalism to bring appearances in line with reality, not to bring reality in line with appearances."
As Filkins stressed when I spoke to him, the reality in Iraq is not something that is clear and immutable. "I think the closer you get to Iraq or Afghanistan, but particularly Iraq, the less sure one is about anything except what's immediately in front of them, and that which you can sort of grasp and feel and talk to," Filkins said. "And I felt that way there. I felt that way about questions large, and questions small, and moral questions -- all those questions. Everything there to me was basically ambiguous and uncertain." The Forever War conveys that ambiguity far more successfully than what is usually published in the U.S. about the Iraq War, and, in that way, it comes across as a more authentic rendering of the conflict than the more straitlaced model of newspaper reporting allows. There is, to be sure, a tension for a paper like the Times in opening its pages to this uncertainty; the news, after all, is at its most basic level about reducing ambiguity. But if Filkins' book is any indication, the benefits -- in texture, depth, and poignancy -- may be worth the leap.
