Dexter Filkins treads the bloody streets of Iraq

'Times' correspondent brings to life the sounds, jarring scenes of war

By John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 25, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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There's something about Dexter Filkins' reporting from the war in Iraq that consistently sets it apart from most other coverage.

Sometimes it's a stray detail, a tossed-off quote or something that makes you stop and think, "Good god. What is going on here?" Mostly, he puts the reader in his combat boots and then puts those boots in dangerous places where most sane people would dare not tread.

Those footprints run all through The Forever War, which retraces Filkins' steps from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, through the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and onto the deadly streets of Baghdad.

Take, for example, this dispatch from the second day of the battle for Fallujah:

"Twilight in Fallujah. A yellow veil descended over the ruined city. Domes of mosques slouched in their wreckage. Apartments, split apart, surrendered their interiors. Minarets lay snapped at the stem. A handful of marines stood on the roof of a three-story building, trading shots with insurgents through the haze. A bullet whizzed past Sergeant Eric Brown and smashed a window behind him.

" 'God I hate this place, the way the sun sets,' Brown said, wiping blood from his lip. He fired into the street."

Filkins makes sure the reader experiences not just the story of the war, but the look, the heat, the smells, the sounds and the jarring scenes. Thus, you not only read about the battle of Fallujah, but you can hear the Marines blasting AC/DC's Hells Bells over their amplifiers as they go block by bloody block against the insurgents.

You learn that one of the weird byproducts of the physics of suicide bombers is that the dead man's head comes landing back to earth, relatively unharmed.

And you watch, just like in an old western, as all the locals fall silent and one by one clear out of a local restaurant the moment Filkins and his translator sit down for a meal.

As the details pile up one after another, you begin to grasp what a deeply dysfunctional society Iraq had become both under Saddam Hussein's vicious reign and in the systematic sectarian blood-letting that followed his demise.

Filkins is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times who has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. In Iraq, he operated out of the Times's Baghdad bureau, a fortified compound in a house outside the Green Zone, where most U.S. and Iraqi leaders are based. Filkins tells how a group of Chileans once stopped him as he was heading out of the Zone and back to the bureau. They were stunned that someone would venture outside and into the city.

His book is a late entry into the crowded field of book-length journalism on Iraq. Other volumes have done a better job explaining the policy failures, military strategies and White House decision-making. But no one does a better job of bringing to life the reality of the war than Filkins.

For example, most newspaper readers who've followed the war know the story of Ahmed Chalabi, the discredited Iraqi exile who bamboozled journalists and government officials into believing that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

But it's quite another thing to find Chalabi, as Filkins does, eating mango ice cream late at night while listening to Vivaldi in his fortified compound, holding forth on Iraqi politics in a manner that seems blissfully unaware of just how absurd he sounds.

Throughout the war, as the insurgency grew stronger each day, the reporter persisted in his high-risk habit of taking a run each morning along a dry river bed. This dangerous routine allowed him to observe American troops building a new park in Baghdad, one thatreplaced and disrupted what had been a popular soccer field. As conditions on the ground deteriorated, it was cordoned off with barbed wire and barriers until it fell into complete disuse.

To Filkins, the park sums up so much about the war: the earnest attempts by the U.S. to repair and improve Iraq; the disconnect between U.S. forces and the local citizenry, and finally, the futility of the effort as increasing security blotted out any attempts at good will.

As with his running regimen, Filkins often took enormous risks to uncover such telling detail. For the most part, he just lets the reader see what he saw without the overlay of opinion. The cumulative effect is to witness what a profound hellhole Iraqis and Americans found themselves in as any semblance of a civilized society slipped its tethers and floated off into chaos.

Filkins' book is like an extended reporter's notebook from a period that ends about one year ago. It does not cover the dramatic changes brought about by the American troop surge and the so-called Sunni awakening, in which local tribal leaders turned on the foreign fighters in their midst. For that part of the war, you can turn to The New York Times, where Filkins has resumed his reporting from Baghdad.

One hopes he does so without taking quite so many risks. Filkins is a journalist who follows in the footsteps of great war correspondents like Ernie Pyle, Homer Bigart and David Halberstam, men who were unafraid to go to the most dangerous places and were equally fearless about reporting the truth they found there.

They put their journalism ahead of their own safety. As this book clearly shows, we are better off for their sacrifice.

The Forever War

* By Dexter Filkins. Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pages, $25.

* Grade: A

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