Infidels and Flip-Flops

Author Sebastian Junger has a new book, War (2010). The book was the result of five trips Junger made to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan between June 2007 and June 2008. The bibliography includes references to such articles as "The Coevolution of Parochial Alturusim and War, " and "Age Difference in Reaction Time: An Artifact." Junger divides the book into three chapters - - Fear, Killing, and Love. He writes the following regarding the very young men serving in this very remote and mountainous area - -

The Army has a lot of regulations about how solders are required to dress, but the farther you get from the generals the less those rules are followed, and Second Platoon was about as far from the generals as you could get. As the deployment wore on and they pushed farther into enemy territory it was sometimes hard to tell you were even looking at American soldiers. They wore their trousers unbloused from their boots and tied amulets around their necks and shuffled around the outpost in flip-flops jury rigged from the packing foam used in missile crates. Toward the end of their tour they'd go through entire firefights in nothing but gym shorts and unlaced boots, cigarettes hanging out of their lips. When the weather got too hot they chopped their shirts off below the armpit and then put on body armor so they sweat less but still look like they were in uniform. They carried long knives and for a while one guy went on operations with a small samurai sword in his belt. The rocks ripped their pants to shreds and they occasionally found themselves more or less exposed on patrol. A few had "INFIDEL," tattooed in huge letters across their chests. ("That's what the enemy calls us on their radios," one man explained, "so why not?") Others had tattoos of angel wings sprouting from bullets or bombs. The men were mostly in their early twenties, and many of them have known nothing but life at home with their parents and war.

The start of the chapter on Killing has the following quote:

We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men

stand ready in the night to visit violence on those

who would do us harm.

- - - Winston Churchill (or George Orwell)