The New York Times’ war correspondent Dexter Filkins discussed his new book, The Forever War with Lawrence Wright in an armchair chat at a recent OPC Book Night at Club Quarters.
For the OPC’s second sold-out event in a row, The New York Times’ award winning war correspondent Dexter Filkins discussed his new book, The Forever War [Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]; with 2007 Pulitzer Prize and OPC Award winner Lawrence Wright in an armchair chat at the OPC’s Book Night at Club Quarters. The event was co-sponsored by The World Policy Institute.
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| OPC Board Member David Andleman, Lawrence Wright and Dexter Filkins before the event. |
“This has got to be one of the most enduring pieces of journalism from this era,” Wright said of the book that has received accolades as “classic”
and “timeless,” “compassionate and “brutally honest,” from fellow war correspondents. “I am sure everyone who has read it feels the same way.”
The prolific writer should know. Wright, a New Yorker staff writer and 1992 OPC Ed Cunningham Award winner, discussed his own book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 [Alfred A. Knopf, 2006] – which scooped the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction – at an OPC Book Night two years ago.
The Forever War is a collection of personal accounts collected over almost a decade of reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan for The Times, by a reporter who previously won the OPC 2004 Hal Boyle newspaper Award for his daily reports on fighting in Fallujah and the 2005 Ed Cunningham magazine Award for “The Fall of the Warrior King” published in The New York Times Magazine.
Filkins survived harsh and perilous conditions that have claimed the lives of two New York Times reporters and approximately 186 correspondents and media support workers – according to the Committee to Protect Journalists – to bring first-hand accounts of a public execution in Kabul, the sacrifices U.S. Marines have made during Operation Iraqi Freedom and graphic description of the aftermath of suicide bombings.
Filkins accompanied a unit that lost one quarter of its Marines during an eight-day sweep from north to south through Fallujah, in 2004, to try to clear the rebellious city of insurgents.
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| Wright and Filkins during the event. |
One loss was deeply personal: Marine Corps Lance Cpl. William L. Miller, 22, of Pearland, Texas in Fallujah, died on November 14 after being shot in the face as he led journalists and soldiers up a minaret of a mosque a couple of blocks from the south side of the city – after a request to photograph a dead insurgent they believed was alone in the tower.
During street-to-street fighting, Filkins would write his dispatches at night inside his zipped sleeping bag on the rooftops of unoccupied homes, with sweat dripping onto the keyboard of his laptop. No light could escape lest it attract sniper fire.
Despite the personal risk and commitment that reporters like Filkins and Wright have taken to bring the reality of war to Americans, both agree that Iraq remains a “pretty abstract place” for most people. Deteriorating conditions discouraged most news outlets to continue reporting the war, Filkins said. He saw the number of reporters attending major press conferences dwindle from around 2,000 in 2004 to perhaps a “dozen.”
“It is not a place where you can feel on your finger tips or in your gut… because it is so dangerous,” Filkins said.
The cost of insuring and protecting journalists is prohibitive to all but the best resourced media outlets. The New York Times Baghdad bureau in a “regular neighborhood” on the east bank of the Tigris River looks like a “medieval fortress” with machine guns on the roof, 45 armed guards, three armored cars and a blast wall, Filkins said. It costs $3 million a year to operate. Life insurance for reporters alone costs nearly $15,000 a month.
And the danger has forced the isolation of American diplomats and many journalists from day-to-day interaction with Iraqis, especially at the nadir of the violence in 2006.
Filkins was taken aback in January 2006 when the American hostage coordinator and former Navy Seal asked him to return to the scene where Christian Science Monitor correspondent Jill Carroll was kidnapped and her translator killed in Western Baghdad, to pick up an evidence bag containing her cell phone, hair samples and shell casings. The diplomat was less concerned about his own safety than the disruption that a heavily armed convoy he was required to take with him would cause as it rumbled through the volatile neighborhoods.
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Dexter Filkings during the event.
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Since leaving Iraq in 2006, Filkins returned in August this year to find a “remarkably” safer Iraq. A park near The New York Times bureau, that had been off limits to civilians, with militia and Iraqi army checkpoints at either end, was now teaming with parents and children.
“It was just amazing. It was a wonderful thing to see. You could see the relief on people’s faces.” Filkins said “In late 2006 the country was dead. It was finished. There was no coming back from something as horrible as what was happening. It turns out it wasn’t dead; people were just in hiding, and my God were they happy to come out.”
He attributes the temporary and fragile security to both the surge of American troops, and the Sunni Awakening, where tribal leaders began cooperating with America against the common enemy of Al Qaeda.
In the Anbar Providence, once the cradle of Sunni insurgency, former insurgents, who had been intent on blowing up homes and killing Americans, are now on the payroll as police officers earning $300 a month and helping to maintain a fragile peace. Violence plummeted in war-torn Ramadi for example, where soldiers can now be seen walking around without their guns. “Is it temporary? Yes, of course. Is it fragile? Yes,” Filkins said. “Is it being sustained by bagfuls of money? Yes, but it is a nice thing to see.”
Despite staying away from weighing in on politics and policy matters in the book, Filkins believes President-elect Barack Obama will be strongly advised by generals that withdrawing troops from Iraq would collapse all progress toward a precarious peace.
“They are trying to make it permanent,” Filkins said. “It depends on how much time we have.”
But if security in Iraq has improved, Afghanistan is a different story. Filkins returned earlier this year to the region, where he had been reporting before the attacks on America in September 11, 2001. He went to the rugged tribal area at the Pakistan and Afghanistan border that is now controlled by the Taliban and where Osama Bin Laden is believed to be in hiding.
Uppermost on policy makers’ minds is a fear that any military action by the United States area could destabilize the weak civilian government in Pakistan, giving an opening to the Taliban to control the nuclear power with a population of 173 million people.