“The Grifters” is a 1963 book by Jim Thompson (published by Vintage/Black Lizard in 1990). It focuses on smalltime con-artist Roy Dillon, along with his girlfriend Myra Langtry and mother, Lilly Dillon, who are also con artists. There are no “good guys.” Everyone’s a crook.

The book has no plot, per se. We’re just dropped into their lives and watch things happen to them. You know events will lead up to a climax of some kind, but don’t really know what it’ll look like. Except that, this being Jim Thompson, there will probably be some dead bodies.

I’m not criticizing the book. It’s a very good book, without the psychotic people who normally populate Jim Thompson books. I really enjoyed it. It’s less than 200 pages and took me about three days.

In 1990 the book was made into a Stephen Frears movie starring John Cusack (one of my favorite actors), Annette Benning, and Angelica Huston. It as a good movie, a character study as much as anything. Donald Westlake, employing his darker Richard Stark persona, wrote the screenplay. I can’t remember the movie well enough to tell you whether or not it faithfully followed the book. But I recommend both the book and movie.

I’ve been reading quite a few books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Most have been very good, and they’ve all been quite different.

“War,” by Sebastian Junger, is my favorite. Junger is best-known for his 1997 book “The Perfect Storm,” a phenomenal work which became an international bestseller. But he has proven himself as a war reporter in such places as Bosnia, Liberia, Cyprus, Kashmir, and now Afghanistan.

Junger is an amazing writer. When I saw that he had written a book on Afghanistan, I knew I had to read it. Likewise for Jon Krakauer, another master wordsmith, who wrote “Where Men Win Glory” (which I reviewed previously). I was blown away by the poetry of “The Perfect Storm.” While the writing of “War” is much different, it’s still brilliant.

For over a year, Junger and a photojournalist embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the remote Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, right along the Pakistani border (a bit north of Tora Bora and the famed Kyber Pass). They especially focused on Restrepo, a small outpost, which found itself in firefights on a regular basis.

The amount of combat experienced at Restrepo and the surrounding outposts is astounding, a real eye-opener. For a while, the firefights occur practically every day. American soldiers die and are wounded frequently. Junger notes, “Most Korengalis have never left their village, and have almost no understanding of the world beyond the mouth of the valley. That makes it a perfect place in which to base an insurgency dedicated to fighting outsiders.”

The title, “War,” is interesting, as if it’s a book about war in general, rather than about a specific combat team in a specific place. But Junger does use Restrepo to generalize about warfare. He uses the experiences of soldiers in the Korengal Valley to draw analogies with previous wars and to cite various studies. We get
to know the American soldiers very well, and we get engrossed in the
life they lead in the Korengal. But through them, we learn what
soldiers in all wars, especially modern wars, experience.

In one fascinating section, he explains what happens physiologically to men during combat–pupils dilating, pulse and blood pressure approaching heart-attack levels, blood flooding the heart, brain, and major muscle groups. A high heart-rate makes it difficult to aim a rifle. At 170 beats per minute, tunnel vision and loss of depth perception occur. It’s fascinating stuff.

 The best way to tell you about this book is to use Sebastian Junger’s words.

“To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power.”

“War is a lot of things, and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting….Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways 20 minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else.”

“Pretty much everyone who died in this valley died when they least expected it, usually shot in the head or throat, so it could make the men weird about the most mundane tasks….The men just never knew, which meant that anything they did was potentially the last thing they’d ever do.”

One soldier told him, “There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other. But they would also die for each other.”

Junger (right) says he never heard the soldiers question the validity of the war. That was a luxury for persons at the main bases, behind the lines.

He talks about “the insane amount of firepower” available to the Americans, like the big shoulder-fired Javelin rocket “that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.”

“Combat was a game that the United States had asked Second Platoon to become very good at, and once they had, the United States had put them on a hilltop without women, hot food, running water, communication with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that the men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. Society can give its young men almost any job and they’ll figure out how to do it. They’ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it WILL get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for.”

“Heroism is hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self–you’re prepared to lose your own life for the sake of others–so in that sense, talking about how brave you were may be psychologically contradictory. (Try telling a mother she was brave to run into traffic to save her kid.) Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered ‘bravery.’ Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward.”

He talks about how soldiers hold each other accountable, because sloppiness doesn’t just endanger them, it endangers everybody. “Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened suddenly–and out there, everything happened suddenly–the guy with the loose laces couldn’t be counted on to keep his feet at a crucial moment. It was the OTHER man’s life he was risking, not just his own.”

“Humans may be the only animal that practices what could be thought of as ‘suicidal defense’: an individual male will rush to the defense of another male despite the fact that both are likely to die.”

“When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at–you’d have to be deranged–but that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.”

If you’re going to read a book about the Afghan-Iraq wars, there are several I recommend highly. But this one tops my list.

I waited a long time for Jon Krakauer’s book about Pat Tillman, “Where Men Win Glory,” to appear in paperback. My interest wasn’t so much Tillman as it was Krakauer, a tremendous writer whose “Into Thin Air” is among the best nonfiction books I’ve read. I knew that Krakauer would cover the story of Pat Tillman–a story shrouded in confusion–in a compelling, thorough way. And he did.

Pat Tillman, an NFL safety for the Arizona Cardinals, put his career on hold to enlist, for three years, in the Army Rangers. This happened a few months after 9/11, and was highly trumpeted in the press. Tillman never spoke to the press about his decision, but he did keep journals of his experiences. Many excerpts appear in this book.

The first part of “Where Men Win Glory” traces Tillman’s formative years. We see him as a youngster. We see his football heroics in high school. We follow him to Arizona State, and then on to the NFL. Throughout this, Krakauer jumps back and forth between Tillman’s life in California and Arizona, and Afghanistan, showing what was happening concurrently in that country–the Soviet occupation, the growing influence of Osama bin Laden, the Soviet withdrawal, years of civil war, the rise of the Taliban. It gives fascinating perspective.

Pat Tillman, the book shows, was an absolutely unique guy who followed his own drumbeat. He constantly challenged himself physically; twice, while hiking in Arizona, he jumped off a cliff into the upper branches of a Ponderosa pine. Though a man’s man, he showed a tenderness toward others. At ASU, he would cry over missing his family and his high school sweetheart, Marie (whom he married shortly before entering the military).

Pat’s brother Kevin, then playing semi-pro baseball, enlisted with Pat. Throughout their military service, they were together–all the way to Pat’s death. They were as close as any brothers can be, and very much alike. Being such nonconformists, it was interesting to observe how they coped with highly-regimented military life. A system based on seniority, not merit, grated on Tillman.

Pat (left) and Kevin Tillman.

As the book shows, Tillman’s military service was not a good experience. He enlisted in hopes of battling the terrorists who caused 9/11. Instead, he soon found himself in Iraq, a war he personally opposed. Even then, he and his fellow Rangers didn’t see action, but largely sat on the sidelines.

After that initial tour, the Tillmans returned to the States, where they aced Ranger School. Then they were sent to Afghanistan, a war Pat Tillman did believe in, and where he had hoped to go all along.

However, even Afghanistan was a disappointment, devoid of action. Pat had, by then, decided that in another year, after his three-year enlistment ended, he would return to football. The military frustrated him.

In April 2004, Pat Tillman died at the hands of fellow Rangers. Against all military wisdom, orders came to divide the Ranger patrol, all in an effort to salvage a broken Humvee. A few Taliban lobbed some mortar shells and fired their AKs, but from then on, it was basically one group of out-of-control Rangers firing at the other group. Krakauer describes everything in great detail. Tillman is shot three times in the head with a Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW).

Earlier in the book, during the Iraq section, Krakauer devotes a lot of time to the Jessica Lynch affair. Her supply convoy stumbles into an ambush, and she, badly injured in a vehicle crash, is taken prisoner. She did nothing heroic. In addition, in the aftermath of the ambush, another 17 American soldiers were accidentally killed by friendly fire from A-10 Warthogs, which made repeated bombing and strafing runs on American troops. It was a total mess.

The White House had created a special Office of Global Communications to manipulate public opinion about the lead-up to the Iraq War, and then to engage in “strategic deception” to shape public opinion in favor of the war once it started. A guy named James Wilkinson, a protege of Karl Rove, was put in charge.

When Jessica Lynch was captured, Wilkinson made up the story–which I clearly remember hearing–about how Lynch courageously held off attacking Iraqis with her M-16 until she was eventually shot and bayoneted. Nothing like this happened. This was followed by an extensive cover-up of the friendly fire deaths, which didn’t become publicly known for many years.

Krakauer told this story as a prelude to the outrageous cover-up following Pat Tillman’s death. The military released a story, told at Tillman’s funeral, about how he died heroically while leading fellow Rangers in charging up a hill at ambushers. General William McChrystal was totally complicit in this. Military protocol says that deceased soldiers are to be shipped back to the States with their uniforms, body armor, and helmets, all of which are considered forensic evidence. But Tillman was sent back naked; orders came down to burn his uniform in Afghanistan. The soldier who carried this out said his orders also involved burning Tillman’s final journal.

McChrystal drew up a Silver Star citation without talking to any eyewitnesses, falsifying information and never revealing to the review board the crucial information that Tillman was killed by friendly fire–a fact which everyone involved knew. Tillman died while hiding behind a hillside rock with another soldier (who survived), avoiding furious machine-gun fire from Rangers down below. But the military needed a combat hero, so they created one. The Iraq war was going badly; the first battle of Fallujah had just ended, and the Abu Graib mess had just broken. The Tillman story provided a distraction.

Numerous military protocols were broken, intentionally. A series of investigations were thwarted. The only persons penalized were low-level Rangers, not the officers complicit in the cover-up and deception (two of whom were soon promoted). The extent of the deception is breath-taking.

Krakauer describes everything in great detail, and it’s maddening. Pat Tillman enlisted to serve his country, and then his country hijacked his virtue and his legacy. And as Kevin Tillman notes, only the fact that Pat Tillman was well-known, coupled with the tenacity of the close-knit Tillman family in pursuing the truth, enabled the facts to come to light. If it had been any other soldier, the cover-up would have succeeded, and the truth would have been buried forever.

This isn’t the book I was expecting to read. But it was truly an amazing, hard-to-put-down book. And I’ll carry with me, for a long time, the uniqueness that was Pat Tillman. I encourage you to read the book if only to learn about this guy who continually challenged himself, did his own thinking, followed his convictions, was wildly devoted to his wife and family, and truly cared about other people.