Journalism at its most powerful. From the opening chapter, which features a nightmarish, almost cinematic scene of combat between US Marines and Iraqi insurgents, Filkins grabs the reader on a hook and doesn't let go. Aside from being an incredibly ballsy reporter who put his own life at risk to embed with soldiers on patrol, travel on his own through dangerous parts of Baghdad, and interview insurgents, Filkins is skillful at turning his experiences into gripping, personal narratives. He refrains from much editorializing, conveying the confusion, absurdity, pain, and stranger-than-fiction realities of life in a war zone in direct, unadorned language. Frankly, his observations themselves are so astonishing and telling, that any commentary would be redundant.

The book is written as a series of vignettes, each offering its own perspective into the dark maze of contradictions, mistakes, cultural misunderstandings, and clashing ideologies that is the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. This narrative-centered format keeps the book at the street level and does a lot to illuminate the individual humanity that's been all but lost on CNN and Fox News. Among many difficult-to-forget moments are a scene where a 19 year old soldier talks of his dreams back home and is killed minutes later by a sniper's bullet; another where a US colonel expresses confidence in a newly created "highway patrol", whose members the author later finds lurking under a bridge in their US-issued uniforms, waiting for "Americans to kill"; and another where Muslim fanatics take a break from building bombs to try to hook up the porn channel. Filkins lets these astounding moments speak for themselves, reminding us that in war, what goes on officially, what goes on in the streets, and what goes in people's minds are rarely in alignment.

As one might suspect from his choice of title, Filkins doesn't arrive at any solutions or offer much comfort (and I suspect that, off the record, he'd have few favorable things to say for the wisdom of the American leaders whose hubris expected an easy victory in Iraq), but I think this work will stand for many years as a fascinating, poignant, and immediate testament to how human beings really are in war and to its unfathomable, uncountable costs.