nicknicknicknick reviewed The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Review of 'The Forever War' on Goodreads
4 stars
1) [In Afghanistan] "The old men, the leaders, were walking junkyards, metal and bullets and shrapnel, heaped over with holes and scar tissue. They'd walk in on peglegs with ill-fitting plastic arms, and when they plunked down in their chairs it was like watching the frame of an old car collapse. They had these handsome oversize features, jutting chins and enormous hands. They'd pour their tea from the cup and slurp it from the saucer, loud, because it was cooler that way. They'd look at you and you'd think, Jesus, they are not killable. They're from another world. They beat the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union fell apart."
2) "Some days I thought we had broken into a mental institution. One of the old ones, from the nineteenth century, where people were dumped and forgotten. It was like we had pried the doors off and found all these people …
1) [In Afghanistan] "The old men, the leaders, were walking junkyards, metal and bullets and shrapnel, heaped over with holes and scar tissue. They'd walk in on peglegs with ill-fitting plastic arms, and when they plunked down in their chairs it was like watching the frame of an old car collapse. They had these handsome oversize features, jutting chins and enormous hands. They'd pour their tea from the cup and slurp it from the saucer, loud, because it was cooler that way. They'd look at you and you'd think, Jesus, they are not killable. They're from another world. They beat the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union fell apart."
2) "Some days I thought we had broken into a mental institution. One of the old ones, from the nineteenth century, where people were dumped and forgotten. It was like we had pried the doors off and found all these people clutching themselves and burying their heads in the corners and sitting in their own filth. It was useful to think of Iraq this way. It helped in your analysis. Murder and torture and sadism: it was part of Iraq. It was in people's brains."
3) "There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves. The one the Iraqis were having with us---that was positive and predictable and boring, and it made the Americans happy because it made them think they were winning. And the Iraqis kept it up because it kept the money flowing, or because it bought them a little peace. The conversation they were having with each other was the one that really mattered, of course. That conversation was the chatter of a whole other world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it."
4) "Driving [into Baghdad] was an upper and a downer at once, like putting a bullet in the chamber."
5) "I fared better than many of the people I wrote about in this book; yet even so, over the course of the events depicted here, I lost the person I cared for most. The war didn't get her; it got me."
