Sebastian Junger’s new book, War, about his time embedded with Second Platoon, Battle Company, in Afghanistan’s dangerous Korengal Valley, will inevitably incur comparisons to Esquire Vietnam correspondent Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the quintessential book of war reporting. In fact, it’s hard not to see War as an attempted successor to Dispatches—a personal account of a difficult foreign war, told from the point of view of the infantrymen on the ground.

Junger certainly has enough material to work with, though there isn’t much of a plot or narrative besides the pulse-pounding, near-constant firefights around Korengal, which Junger calls “the Afghanistan of Afghanistan.” His real focus is the characters in Battle Company—philosophical “redneck” Bobby Gene, laconic screw-up Brendan O’Byrne – who he lived with in vulnerable, hastily built camps for more than a year, experiencing the absurdly tense, difficult existence of a soldier on the front lines. Junger, who gave us The Perfect Storm, is keen to explore the mentality that compels soldiers to act in ways that are contrary to their instinct—why an infantryman would jump on a grenade, say. War also captures the desperate solipsism of professional soldiers, who fight not out of conviction or belief, but so they can survive to fight again the next day.

Unfortunately, Junger limits himself to a fairly shallow, pop-psychological approach, and his insistence on avoiding political concerns costs the book a certain immediacy, since the day-to-day life of a soldier hasn’t much changed since Dispatches was released in 1977. Even worse, sometimes the book just isn’t that well-written: Junger renders battle scenes in the present tense, but then distractingly shifts to the past tense when he interviews the soldiers. And without the glossary and appended list of characters, it would be easy to get totally lost. War convincingly demonstrates Junger’s deep commitment to his profession, but Dispatches remains the gold standard for conveying the contradictory personalities and the chaos at the heart of modern warfare.

Max Read