Until Dexter Filkins’ riveting The Forever War, I hadn’t been predisposed to reading much about the War in Iraq, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because it’s still going on, and the whole thing’s so raw and in the news that I didn’t feel the need to wallow any further.

I am very glad, however, that I gave this New York Times foreign correspondent’s memoir a shot. I was hooked after five pages. I can’t recommend the book enough.

The Forever War is not an anti-war screed. Filkins allows you to draw your own conclusions, although it’s clear that his experiences were so fucked that he was lucky to get out of there with his head screwed on halfway straight. Fact is, he was lucky to get out at all, but I won’t give details away.

Above all, this fast-moving narrative captures the madness and dysfunction that resulted from the American invasion. It ends before the surge, at a time when sectarian rivalries made it nigh impossible to sort out who was fighting who.

Filkins puts the lie to the notion that Iraqis were grateful for their freedom. But his vignettes illustrate a much more nuanced situation than mere love-us-or-hate-us.

He recounts an interview with a record keeper, Hassan Naji, at a decimated hospital where infant mortality rates had risen dramatically:

This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...