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C. J. Chivers

The Fighters Hardcover – August 14, 2018

by C. J. Chivers (Author)

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“A classic of war reporting...The author’s stories give heart-rending meaning to the lives and deaths of these men and women, even if policymakers generally have not.” —The New York Times

Pulitzer Prize winner C.J. Chivers’s unvarnished account of modern combat, told through the eyes of the fighters who have waged America’s longest wars.

More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001. C.J. Chivers reported from both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant.

Chivers captures their courage, commitment, sense of purpose, and ultimately their suffering, frustration, and moral confusion as new enemies arise and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which American forces were often not prepared.

The Fighters is a tour de force, a portrait of modern warfare that parts from slogans to do for American troops what Stephen Ambrose did for the G.I.s of World War II and Michael Herr for the grunts in Vietnam. Told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran, The Fighters presents the long arc of two wars.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster
Publication date

August 14, 2018
Dimensions

6.13 x 1.1 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

1451676646
ISBN-13

978-1451676648
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A classic of war reporting . . . There is no down time in this relentless book . . . It is real and in the moment . . . Chivers’s achievement has been to make his subjects mythic as well as human . . . The author’s stories give heart-rending meaning to the lives and deaths of these men and women, even if policymakers generally have not.”—The New York Times

"A masterpiece."—Providence Journal

“Remarkable. . . . a memorial in pages.”—The Washington Post

“Gripping, unforgettable.”—The Boston Globe

“A masterful work of atmospheric reporting, and it’s a book that will have every reader asking – with varying degrees of urgency or anger or despair – the final question Chivers himself asks: ‘How many lives had these wars wrecked?’”—Christian Science Monitor

“C.J. Chivers, an artist among war correspondents, fashions a vast mosaic of bravery and miscalculation from the lives of American combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[Chivers] draws on the grit, sweat, and raw emotion of war to tell a story as few can, with a reality so unflinchingly rich and powerful that it can be overwhelming for the uninitiated reader....The Fighters cements his reputation as the foremost combat journalist of his generation.”—Modern War Institute at West Point

“A bitter dose of truth about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. . . . The Fighters is about as accurate a depiction of combat in the Sandbox as we are going to see in our lifetimes.”—Field & Stream

“A chilling account of failed American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq through the searing experiences of six fighters.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“A Must-Read Book…The Fighters will stand as an essential record of Americans in combat in the years following September 11.”—Men's Journal

“The narrative he weaves is not only compelling but may change what you think you know about the American military experience in these two countries.”—Christian Science Monitor

“Gripping and thought-provoking.”—USA Today

“The Fighters spares no one. . . . These are not easy hero stories with smooth edges, but in their lack of cohesion and conclusion down in the gray areas where they dwell, they shine back at us, forcing us to look at what we’ve done as a nation, forcing us to look at ourselves.”—Popular Mechanics

“A necessary, immersive narrative of what it’s like for a soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting without a clear end.”—Chicago Tribune

“Evocative . . . This fast-paced, action-heavy work of long-form war journalism has bestseller written all over it.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Wonderfully engaging. Readers will empathize with the trials each faced in combat and beyond in a book that will enlighten all who read it, no matter their feelings about the wars.”—Booklist, starred review

“The Fighters is a rare book that thrusts the reader straight into the sweaty, filthy, exhausted reality of war while also revealing the broad sweep and scope of our nation’s struggles. It joins the best war literature this country has ever produced.”—Sebastian Junger, New York Times bestselling author of Tribe and War

“Courageous in its reporting and shining in its humanity, The Fighters is a defining document of what war truly is.”—David Finkel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Thank You For Your Service and The Good Soldiers

“A riveting, heart-rending, and chastening account of the Americans who are waging wars that the rest of us have already chosen to forget. It is a gift to the nation, both deeply moving and profound in its implications.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, New York Times bestselling author of America's War for the Greater Middle East

About the Author

C.J. Chivers is a correspondent for The New York Times and a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine. His magazine story “The Fighter” won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. In 2009 he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Chivers served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps in the Persian Gulf War and on peacekeeping duty during the Los Angeles riots. He is the author of The Gun and The Fighters.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Fighters

Preface

FEBRUARY 14, 2010

Marja, Afghanistan

The American medevac helicopter descended toward a shattered home on the Afghan steppe, sweeping grit against its mud-walled remains. Gunfire cracked past. Inside the ruins, several young infantrymen from Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, crouched near the bodies of freshly killed civilians. They had tallied eleven corpses so far. All but two were women or children.

Two American rockets had struck here a short while before, a pair of errant blows in a battle between the Marines and the Taliban that had begun in the morning of Valentine’s Day. In the seconds after, as a dusty smoke cloud rose, a small girl scrambled out. For a moment she stood still. Then she ran, sprinting headlong to another nearby building, which the Americans occupied as a temporary outpost. Her father was detained inside.

Soon Marines were hustling across the field, crossing the open space where a gunfight had raged for hours. When they entered they found one more survivor—a young woman lying in a pool of blood. She was calling out children’s names. The blasts had severed both her legs and one of her arms. Covered with dirt, streaked with blood, she moaned and repeatedly asked for the kids. She tried sitting up. A corpsman and a few Marines consoled her. A lieutenant and a sergeant with radios called their commanding officer, seeking a Black Hawk medevac aircraft to rush the woman to care. Around her the bodies of her family were scattered where they had died, not far from dead poultry and sheep. Gently the Marines assured the dying woman that all would be okay.

The Pentagon and the manufacturer of the weapon that struck here, known as a HIMARS,I consider its ordnance to be precise. Its GPS sensors and guidance system help the rockets fly scores of miles and slam to earth within feet of the coordinates they are programmed to hit. Each carries a high-explosive warhead and a fuze that can be set to burst in the air, maximizing the spread of shrapnel below. The manufacturer markets them as “low collateral damage” weapons. This is true on practice ranges. Battlefields rarely resemble ranges. More often they are the lands where people live and work, and in this profoundly poor village, the Pentagon’s precision weapons had hit precisely the wrong place. A sniper had been firing on the Marines from near another home, but the rockets landed here. A family following American instructions—stay inside and out of the way—had been almost instantly destroyed.

By the time the Black Hawk arrived, the woman had died.

The aircraft flew into a trap.

Automatic fire erupted. Kalashnikov rifles joined in. The Taliban had been waiting, and ambushed the aircraft as its wheels settled toward the ground. The lieutenant and sergeant ran into view, arms waving, warding the pilots off. Their company commander shouted to a radio operator: “Abort! Abort! Tell him to abort!”

The helicopter lurched forward, gathering speed. A rocket-propelled grenade whooshed into the whirling tower of dust. An explosion boomed behind the Black Hawk’s tail rotor—a near miss. The helicopter flew across the field, banked, and put down near the company commander to pick up a wounded Marine, whom the sniper had shot. Then it was gone.

A lull replaced the din. Young men muttered curses. Inside the compound, Afghan soldiers working with the Marines covered the dead with cloth. A Taliban commander, overheard on his own radio frequency, berated his fighters in Pashto for missing the Black Hawk. He’d almost realized his prize. “That was your chance!” he said.

These Marines were almost all young men on their first enlistments, the type of citizen who serves for four years and returns to civilian life. They were thoroughly trained, visibly fit, thoughtfully equipped, and generally eager to participate in what they were told would be a historic fight, a campaign preordained for American military lore. Most of them were also so new to war that the dead women and children were the first casualties they had seen. Many of them wanted then, and still want now, to connect their battlefield service to something greater than a memory reel of gunfights, explosions, and grievous wounds. They wanted to understand accidental killings as isolated mistakes in a campaign characterized by sound strategy, moral authority, and lasting success. They didn’t get this, at least not all of it. Instead, the major general commanding NATO forces in southern Afghanistan circulated a publicly palatable version. The HIMARS rockets, he said, hit the correct building after all. For years the Marine Corps and the Pentagon said little more, even as Marja, seized by Marines and then held by their Afghan army and police partners, returned to Taliban and drug-baron control.

This book is about men and women who served in American combat service in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It covers these combatants with a simple organizing idea: that they are human. It details personal experiences: what these experiences were, how they unfolded, and what effects they had upon those who were there. And it covers them from their own perspectives, offering their own interpretations of their wars.

More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since late 2001. Many went to both wars. Nearly 7,000 of them died, and tens of thousands more were wounded. President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, retired Marine Corps General John F. Kelly, who lost a son in combat in Afghanistan and under whom I briefly served three decades ago when he led the course that trains new Marine infantry officers, called these men and women “the best 1 percent this country produces.” He added: “Most of you, as Americans, don’t know them. Many of you don’t know anyone who knows any one of them.” This book is an effort to remedy that, in part through demystification. In doing so, it also rejects many senior officer views. It channels those who did the bulk of the fighting with the unapologetic belief that the voices of combatants of the lower and middle rank are more valuable, and more likely to be candid and rooted in battlefield experience, than those of the generals and admirals who order them to action—and often try to speak for them, too.

No single military unit or individual character can capture the breadth of the national projects the wars became. But the cross section of characters who follow represents the experiences of a significant portion. Many of them served in the infantry or the Special Forces or performed jobs—as a strike fighter or scout-helicopter pilot, or as a corpsman—that were closely connected with infantry life. These men and women volunteered, uttered their oaths, and entrusted themselves to politicians and officers who would decide where, when, and why they would go. Some had brief enlistments. They felt compelled to serve for part of their youth. Others chose full careers, embarked upon multiple combat deployments, and stayed beyond twenty years, returning to the wars with tiring bodies and graying hair. All of them had personally grueling wartime experiences. Most of them suffered wounds—physical, psychological, moral, or all three. Together, their journeys hold part of the sum of American foreign policy in our time.

Stripped down, such journeys also hold something else: the recognition that for many combatants the wars were for a time reduced to something local and immediate, little more than who was near and whatever happened. This human experience of combat is often unexpressed by the public relations specialists and senior officers who try to explain the purposes of operations rather than describe the experience of them, and who together drive an outsized share of the discourse of American wars in real time. The pages that follow offer personal experiences over official narratives and slogans. They are a presentation of what results when ideas about warfighting, some of them flawed, become orders.

Grunts, as members of the infantry call themselves with grim pride, live beyond the end of the road. They do not make policy. They are stuck in it, which is to say that they are the inheritors of the problems caused by the ambitions, poor judgments, and mistakes of others, starting with their politicians and generals and continuing down the line. They have jobs that are almost impossible to do perfectly, much less perfectly all the time. Even when they mean well, they are often attacked with as much ferocity and thwarted with as much cunning as when they intend to do harm. Often they are punished simply for being present, set upon for the offense of being there.

On one matter there can be no argument. The foreign policies that sent these men and women abroad, with an emphasis on military activity and visions of reordering foreign nations and cultures, did not succeed. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq failed to achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the officers in command. Astonishingly expensive, operationally incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars continued in varied forms each and every year after the first passenger jet struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without a satisfying end in sight.

As the costs grew—whether measured by dollars spent, stature lost, or blood shed—the wars’ organizers and the commentators supporting them were ready with optimistic predictions. According to the bullhorns and depending on the year, America’s military campaigns would satisfy justice, displace tyrants, spread democracy, prevent sectarian war, reduce corruption, bolster women’s rights, decrease the international heroin trade, check the influence of extreme religious ideology, create Iraqi and Afghan security forces that would be law-abiding and competent, and finally build nations that might peacefully stand on their own in a global world, all while discouraging other would-be despots and terrorists with evil designs.

Little of this turned out as briefed. Aside from displacing tyrants and the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, prominent successes were short-lived. New thugs rose where old thugs fell. New enemies emerged or multiplied, including the Islamic State. Corruption and lawlessness remain entrenched. An uncountable tally of innocent people—many times the number of those who perished in the terrorist attacks in Washington, Pennsylvania, and New York—were killed. Many more were wounded or driven from their homes, first by American action and then by violent social forces that American action helped unleash. The scale of waste was almost immeasurable. Much of the infrastructure the United States built with its citizens’ treasure and its troops’ labor lies abandoned. Briefly schools or outposts, many structures are now husks, nothing but looted and desolate monuments to forgotten plans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons provided to would-be allies have vanished; an uncountable number are on markets or in the hands of enemies. The billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers, and thieves. National police or army units the Pentagon touted as essential to their countries’ futures have disbanded, ceding their equipment as they disappeared. The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, which the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile and willing to align with Washington’s competitors or foes. The nations they struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have grown savvy through the experience of fighting the American military machine. The Pentagon specializes in war. Across three presidential administrations, with a license to spend and experiment unmatched by any nation on earth, it managed, again and again, to make war look like a bad idea.

More than a decade and a half after the White House insisted that American troops would be welcomed as liberators, large swaths of territory in both nations are so hostile to the United States that they are no-go zones, regions into which almost no Americans dare to tread, save a few journalists and aid workers, or private contractors or American military and CIA teams. The American fighters who do venture into the badlands operate within a dilemma. Their presence is fuel for insurgency and yet their absence can create sanctuaries for extremists to organize and grow.

Such are the legacies of the American campaigns.

To understand some of what is portrayed in the pages that follow, two elements of these campaigns demand forthright explanation here: the relations between American combat units and civilians where they operated, and the struggles of Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s security forces.

One of the many sorrows of the wars is that most American troops had little substantive interaction with Afghan and Iraqi civilians. Language and cultural differences, tactics, rules, security barriers, operational tempo, violence, racism, mutual suspicions, and a dearth of interpreters all combined to prevent it. The people who lived where Americans fought and patrolled, and whose protection was presented in official statements as one of the wars’ organizing ideas, often were regarded by those on duty in the provinces as scenery, puzzles, problems, or worse. Citizens and occupiers had physical proximity but almost total social distance. Special Forces units, depending on how they were used, could be an exception but often were not. The result was that during action, and after, American combatants had little means to gain insight into the views or experiences of Afghan and Iraqi civilians, as is often evident in veterans’ memories and accounts of their tours.

As for the Afghans and Iraqis that American forces did interact closely with—members of Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s security forces—many American troops, including many in this book, formed harsh views. These views were true to their time. They reflected particular circumstances during the occupations and relations more generally between American and local partner forces among the conventional rank and file. But they should not be read as an indictment of Afghan and Iraqi troops overall, especially during the most ambitious years of these forces’ expansion. This is because the conventional national forces of Afghanistan and Iraq—as organized and provided for by American generals—were poorly matched for operations alongside American units. In retrospect, they were built almost perfectly to fail.

The design flaws were many. From the outset, Afghan and Iraqi volunteers were issued less capable weapons and vehicles, and fewer items of protective equipment, than their American partners. Their training was rudimentary and hurried, and opportunities for improvement via battlefield experience were undercut by competing American ambitions. (As local units became seasoned, and capable noncommissioned officers emerged, many of these promising Afghan and Iraqi veterans were offered jobs to work with American special operations forces, depriving line units of competent people.) Limited vetting of applicants ensured that the local ranks were infiltrated by collaborators and spies. Ugly disparities and unwise thrift were manifest on the battlefield, undermining morale. One example: The quality of medical care for Afghan and Iraqi service members was so far beneath the care provided to Americans that the arrangement resembled a caste system in which local lives were less valued than those of the occupying troops. This was often on display after firefights and bomb attacks in Afghanistan. Wounded Americans were rushed to modern Western military hospitals staffed by robust surgical teams; Afghans cut down beside them were flown to Afghan medical centers with little equipment and comparatively abysmal standards of trauma care. Another example: Wages for Afghans and Iraqi conscripts were small enough that their rifles and pistols could fetch several months’ worth of pay on black markets—a structural imbalance that encouraged mass desertion and the flow of weapons to jihadist hands.

All this amplified the already substantial difficulties in forming cohesion between forces that did not speak the same languages and were culturally apart, and helped foster the mutual resentment evident between the forces. Nonetheless, well-intentioned Afghans and Iraqis gambled on American promises, only to suffer and die in quantities far exceeding the American loss of life. Blame for their shortfalls cannot fairly be assigned only to them. They were victims of Pentagon folly, too.

How to examine personal combat service in wars replete with miscalculations of such scale? By remembering that national failures and individual experiences, while inextricably linked, are distinct. One chronicler of prominent veterans of Vietnam called his subjects “a flesh and blood repository of that generation’s anguish and sense of betrayal.”II For veterans of recent American wars, the postwar experience has been different. Beyond their physical wounds and the psychological toll, the bulk of them were not betrayed in the same sense—at least, not by most of their fellow citizens, who have mostly been supportive of this generation’s all-volunteer force. These American veterans confront something pernicious but usually invisible: the difficulties of trying to square their feelings of commitment after the terrorist attacks in 2001 with the knowledge that their lives were harnessed to wars that ran far past the pursuit of justice and ultimately did not succeed. They were betrayed not by their neighbors, but by their leaders. Although each of the combatants in this book was different, they shared a pair of behaviors that shaped their lives and became part of who they were—a determination to serve the American public, and an intensity with which they came to their fellow fighters’ aid. Selflessness in extreme circumstance was a binding, animating trait. Stripped of all other context, apart from the errors and misjudgments above them, this is what the pages that follow are about, so that their labors—what they gave in good faith—might be more fully understood, even where squandered by those who sent them into circumstances of grave danger, moral confusion, and agonizing deed.

New York, N.Y.

April 2018

I. Acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, a product of Lockheed Martin.

II. From The Nightingale’s Song, by Robert Timberg.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (August 14, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1451676646
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1451676648
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.44 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.1 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #404,881 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #211 in Military Policy (Books)
- #305 in Afghan War Military History
- #386 in United States Military Veterans History

Customer Reviews:
280 ratings

About the author

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C. J. Chivers

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A former Marine Corps infantry officer, C.J. Chivers is a senior writer at The New York Times. He contributes to the Foreign and Investigative desks and frequently posts on the At War blog, writing on war, tactics, human rights, politics, crime and the arms trade from Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, Georgia, Chechnya and elsewhere on a wide range of assignments.

In addition to writing, he shoots video and, occasionally, photographs. He served as Moscow correspondent from June 2004 through 2007, and was the paper's Moscow bureau chief in 2007 and 2008. He has also covered war zones or conflicts in the Palestinian territories, Israel and Central Asia. From 1999 until 2001 he covered crime and law enforcement in New York City, working in a three-reporter bureau inside the police headquarters in Lower Manhattan. While in this bureau, he covered the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Before joining The Times, Chivers was a staff writer at The Providence Journal in Rhode Island from 1995 until 1999, covering crime and politics, and was a contributor to several magazines, writing on wildlife, natural history and conservation. He remains a contributor to Esquire and Field & Stream.

From 1988 until 1994, Chivers was an officer in the United States Marine Corps, serving in the Persian Gulf War and performing peacekeeping duties as a company commander during the Los Angeles riots. He was honorably discharged as a captain in 1994.

In 1996, Chivers received the Livingston Award for International Journalism for a series on the collapse of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. Two of his stories in The Times from Afghanistan were cited in the award of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2002. In 2007, his reconstruction for Esquire of the terrorist siege of a public school in Beslan, Russia, won the Michael Kelly Award and National Magazine Award for Reporting. He was also part of The Times's team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2009, for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. His combat reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan, with that of his colleague Dexter Filkins and the photographer Tyler Hicks, with whom he often works, was selected in 2010 by New York University as one of the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade.

His book of history and conflict, "The Gun," mixes years or archival research, battlefield reportage and investigative reporting in Europe, Russia, the United States and Africa to document the origins, spread and effects of the world's most abundant firearm. Told through battlefield reconstructions and character sketches that trace an evolution in technology and in war, it will be published by Simon & Schuster in October, 2010.

Chivers was born in Binghamton, N.Y. He graduated with a B.A. cum laude in English from Cornell University in January 1988 and was the 1995 valedictorian of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also graduated from several military schools, including the United States Army's Ranger Course. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife and their five children.

Articles, essays, blog posts, photographs and video reports by C.J. Chivers can be found on the websites of The New York Times, Esquire, and the At War blog, or on www.cjchivers.com.

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MP

Excellent Work , the reality of Combat writ large

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

The author , a Marine Grunt Officer from my War had the guts and nuts to delve deep into the realities of post 9-11 Combat.
The book is so good , so visceral that I could only read it in small alliquots , as it is extremely triggering . Despite this or because of it , I highly recommend it to folks interested in what happens in Combat , especially the friends and family members who may not understand why Daddy flinches when a car backfires or why he constantly has his head on a swivel.

He takes you into an F-18 and the pilot’s brain Housing group , where there are life long consequences to dropping ordinance.
On a different Story he takes you along to the Brotherhood of FMF Corpsmen who love their Marines so much that they willingly RUN into firefights whilst their Grunt Marines lay prone supressing.
He takes you into a mature Platoon Commander tour , where within days the Red Legs accidentally waste an entire compound of Women and Children in Afghanistan. The reality is that after the action , FMF Docs and Marine Grunts sort through body parts to prepare the bodies for burial.

The author is unapologetic when describing the disconnect from Senior Officers who have no clue what their own Young MEN are doing. Like the 0-6 who would NOT step out until he had Two Apache’s to protect his cowardly self.

The author has a gift and I a.m so blessed to discover this work.
SFMF

18 people found this helpful

Helpful

DL

I was disappointed in this book

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

I heard the author on NPR and since I have read most everything on the war in Afghanistan (and before) I immediately downloaded it and looks forward to it. Because of the interview I was aware of what happened to Dustin Kirby before reading the book. The sections on specifics of the Iraq & Afghanistan wars were well researched and easy to read. The sections on the individuals read like historical fiction, and the organization was distracting. The authors viewpoint, which I share, was never far from the surface - I wanted to like this account more than I did

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

A collection of important sagas

Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2020

Verified Purchase

Fighters gathers the stories of a number of American combat soldiers to provide a sense of what has been the experience of the U.S. professional military as engaged in some lengthy and often confusing wars. There's a good variety and some are followed through several phases and theaters.

It is obvious a lot of research went into this assembly as well as lot of compassion for those being depicted. It is easy to invest your own concerns and care and then feel some of the impacts a bit deeper.

While the author captures some of the doubts that have surrounded these "forever wars", it is not a political effort. Instead it focuses on how the fog of what the U.S. is trying to accomplish is managed by those most affected by the battles that define these conflicts.

It's a solid, respectful effort. I learned a lot and valued the time I invested.

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Richard J. Gibson

Brilliant, Compelling, Dispassionately Passionate, Descriptions of US Wars and Those Who Fight Them

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2018

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I completed this in two readings, each page drawing me in deeper. The descriptions of battles match my own many interviews with Iraq and Afghan vets. I will urge this on my students, and give my vet-students fair warning of some of the pain within. That said, I take issue: the author refers to what most call the "stab in the back" thesis about returned Vietnam troops. It is simply not true. The anti-war movement welcomed them. They led dozens of anti-war marches, threw their medals back at Congress, and more. The easy entre for that is the film, "Sir No Sir." It is online. The people who mis-treated the Vietnam vets were the US government political, economic, and military classes, especially the VA--note the deliberate delays on Agent Orange benefits. That's killing my friends as I write. Similar events happen to some of the vets in "The Fighers." The comparisons to Vietnam are endless, and some are noted in the text: corrupt puppet leadership, stupid military mis-leaders who have no grand strategy, no strategy, just tactics--wasting youth, doing all the things Sun Tzu says not to do. Of course, there is much more, but last--say capitalism and imperialism. That is what this is. It is all about profits, markets, cheap labor, regional contol. It's barbarism emanating from a decaying empire. And, like Vietnam, the US will lose. Neither reason nor human equality will advance. In grunt terms, it is FUBARED.

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Melissa S.

Perhaps the best accounting of the Post-9/11 Servicemember that you'll ever find

Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2018

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Chivers tops The Gun, and it will be highway robbery if he doesn't win another Pulitzer. Should be required reading for every American, particularly those who will be responsible for those on the front end of American foreign and domestic policy.

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Lookingglassman

Outstanding Book!

Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2018

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This has got to be one of the best books I have read this year. The author provides portraits of different service men and women who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, warts and all. This book draws you into their stories and places you with them in the aircraft, HMMWVs, on patrol, on ambush, and helicopters. You can feel the anguish they feel as they learn of the fate of their own. You read how these aren't super soldiers, so to speak, but ordinary men and women who put their lives on the line. Some did not believe in what they were doing, but they did it anyway. The true heart of a warrior. This book is also a real tear jerker because as you read you get invested in these people and some do not have great endings. The author makes you feel as if you lost someone you befriended. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone interested in what our military personnel go through. There are no politics in this book, thank goodness. The author is not pushing a political agenda, he just wants to show the reader the brutal realities of war and he accomplishes that mission.

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Kindle Customer

War, lives, money, power.

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2018

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This should be required reading for every employee of the Veterans Adminiistration. The cost of war never includes the costs of veterans, their families or its victims. Every combat veteran I know loses, time in their ordinary life, hurts everyone around them and carries the costs for the rest of their lives.
If some clever economist could measure this element of war, what it costs when we come home, we might be on a path that proves that war is much more expensive than peace.

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Apoptoastie

A glossy portrayal of GI heroics, but that this was one of the war crimes of the century is ignored.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 17, 2020

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Gives one a reasonable feel for GIs and British forces experiences, but lacks context. Does not even attempt to deal with Blair and Bush's lies designed to take us to war and the war crimes that ensued. Or Saddam's hatred of Osama bin Laden. The Weapons of mass destruction are at best afterthoughts that warrant around a sentence each. The widespread use of torture ("we tortured some folks", as Obama put it), the criminal international kidnappings (renditions), the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the after effects of depleted uranium being used as tank shells, and the biggest crime of all, to initiate a war of aggression, don't even get a mention. Neither do the preceding ten years of sanctions, resulting in lack of medication that killed over 100000 Iraqi children, and the real reasons for the war, Israeli and Saudi desires and Bush's father's attempted assassination. In summary a book that gives a completely distorted impression of the causes of the war.

One person found this helpful

Bob S

Reality of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2018

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I've just finished reading Christopher Chivers book 'The Fighters'. It is without doubt the most compelling book that I have read regarding the realities of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book is not written from a commander's or a politician's perspective, but covers the gritty and unforgiving nature of modern war. Some of the first-hand accounts in the book are both riveting and heart-breaking in equal measure.

For those who have served in Baghdad, Basra, Al Anbar or Helmand, especially those who have worked with the USMC and US Army, this is a 'must read' book. Lest we forget those who didn't return from a foreign field, or those who returned with physical and psychological wounds they will carry for the remainder of their lives.

Semper Fi Chris

Kindle Customer

An excellent, informative book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 10, 2019

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I have just finished this book and it was excellent. I usually read WW1 & WW2 literature but I am so glad I bought this book as it told the story of 'real' modern soldiers. It was factual and informative whilst making you feel you were close to the individuals concerned. I also was grateful that there were follow-ups of some of the soldiers after their wars finished.

Thomas A. Regelski

Not much "action" but readable.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2018

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The book follows a group of fighters, pilots and grunts. Each gives a brief bio of the leading figure then traces his adventures in battle. Some later chapters pick up with the same person. The setting is Iraq and Afganistan. Not exactl a page turner, but interesting enough to keep my attention throughout.

John

Fantastic. Informative and emotional.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 12, 2018

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Perhaps one of the greatest books on modern warfare. Told from the perspective of the soldiers, it is both fair and brutally honest. A study of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that shows that no matter what technological advantages you possess, or how well trained your military personnel are, a war against an entire population is nearly impossible to win.

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The Fighters Hardcover – August 14, 2018

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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C. J. Chivers

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Buy new:

$15.43

FREE delivery: Thursday, March 24 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon

Sold by: Falcon-Store

Buy used:

$8.23