EAGLE DOWN

The former Kabul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal delivers a searing, dispiriting portrait of America’s elite warriors in the field.

If the title echoes Black Hawk Down, it’s for good reason: One of the many tragic episodes in Donati’s potent report from the front—not that there’s one in guerrilla war, of course—has at its center a downed helicopter, besieged Special Forces soldiers, and all the miscommunications and misunderstandings that the fog of war enshrouds. A terrible death anchors that episode, but death is the business at hand. So it is with the Green Berets whom Donati profiles, most of them professional soldiers of a serious, even scholarly bent skilled in various martial disciplines. Nowhere is that more true than Afghanistan, where, over the years covered here, regular soldiers were withdrawn, leaving it to Special Forces to fight the Taliban in places like the Helmand region, whose Sangin district British troops had nicknamed Sangingrad, “after the World War II siege by German troops of Stalingrad, where thousands perished during the Nazi invasion of Russia.” It’s a place specially designed to draw out foreign blood but also that of the native people. Donati recounts the accidental bombing of a hospital, killing civilians and leading to stern letters of reprimand in personnel files, as well as the story of a dedicated soldier who stepped on a mine, lost his legs, and would up in a bureaucratic nightmare of a kind at which the military excels: “No one could tell him how to get new orders generated and restart his medical coverage. He had to wheel himself from office to office, asking questions.” Donati’s on-the-ground account—and it’s clear that she put herself in constant danger to tell the soldiers’ stories even as American officials dithered about how to deploy those troops—is sometimes as hallucinatory as Dispatches and as taut and well written as Mark Bowden’s now-classic book.

Exemplary journalism and a powerful argument for not putting soldiers in harm’s way unless we’re sure we know why.