War Journalism: Bearing Witness at the End of the World

Loyd went to Bosnia to escape heroin and instead found a war that was the only thing capable of making him feel alive. The confessional runs parallel to the reportage — the bodies in the snow, the sieged cities, the atrocities documented with a journalist's eye and an addict's hunger for extreme sensation. A book that is honest about war's appeal in a way that makes that appeal more disturbing, not less.

Four photographers documented the township violence in South Africa's transition years; two died. Marinovich and Silva's account of that work — the cost of bearing witness, the Pulitzers, the colleagues lost — is also an account of what photography does to those who take the photographs. The picture that wins the prize versus the picture that haunts you. These are not always the same.

Junger embedded with a platoon in the Korengal Valley, the most dangerous posting in Afghanistan, and produced something closer to anthropology than journalism. He is interested in why men in combat become each other's world — the love, the boredom, the fear so habitual it becomes baseline. The war is not glorified, but the bonds are. That is either the book's honesty or its blind spot. Possibly both.

The title is the letter Tutsi pastors sent to their Hutu church president before the genocide. Gourevitch was in Rwanda shortly after and produced the most morally serious account of the hundred days that killed eight hundred thousand people. The title contains the entire argument: these people knew what was coming, told those who could have helped, and were failed. Not abandoned. Failed.

Keane drove into Rwanda during the killing and wrote what he saw with the precision of a man committing testimony to paper before the nightmares could blur it. His BBC dispatches won awards; this book is what the awards did not fully contain — the grief of the correspondent, the smell of the churches where the bodies still lay, the children. Always the children. A small book that weighs everything.

Coll's Pulitzer-winning history of the CIA in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion through September 10, 2001 is the essential account of how the world arrived at September 11. The failures are not those of villains but of institutions, incentives, and the limits of intelligence in a country that defeated every empire sent into it. The tragedy is structural. That makes it worse.

Pat Tillman gave up an NFL contract to enlist after 9/11 and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan — then made into a propaganda myth by an army that suppressed the truth from his family. Krakauer's account of the cover-up is enraging; his portrait of Tillman the actual person, rather than the symbol the government manufactured, is something rarer and better: a rescue from myth.

Filkins covered Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times and his dispatches became this book, written with the compression and moral weight of great fiction. The Fallujah battle scenes are among the finest war writing in the language. But the book's lasting quality is its refusal of resolution: there is no arc here, no conclusion, only the ongoing destruction, and the correspondents who wake up to it every morning.

Power documents America's response to every genocide of the twentieth century — the Armenians, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda — and finds a consistent pattern: knowledge without action, rhetoric without intervention, the deliberate choice not to use the word genocide because using it would require a response. The book won the Pulitzer. American foreign policy continued as before. The age of genocide continued with it.

Finkel embedded with an infantry battalion during the 2007 surge in Baghdad — the optimism of command, the IEDs, the brain injuries, the phone calls home. The title is not ironic. These men were good soldiers. That is exactly the tragedy: their competence, their courage, and their decency were entirely insufficient to the task being asked of them. A masterpiece of military journalism.