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The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror by Dexter Filkins
By Dexter Filkins' own admission, the death threat was a sign that his presence was intolerable.
Eating lunch at a roadside kebab house about 130km north of Baghdad on the edge of Sunni Triangle, Filkins, a reporter with the New York Times, was well aware of the ever-present danger in Iraq.
The initial stage of the American invasion was little more than six months old.
Murder, torture and looting had marred the aftermath of the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Rather than the relatively rapid transition to democracy envisioned by some in the Bush Administration, the country was quickly descending into bloody chaos.
And compared with the cheering crowds and words of thanks that Filkins had personally witnessed in northern Afghanistan just a year and a half earlier, the mood in the streets of Iraq was often openly hostile: it was clear that many Iraqis already saw US forces as brutal occupiers, rather than benevolent liberators.
Filkins, who in Afghanistan had enjoyed what he describes as the ability to "go anywhere we want, and meet anyone", was also shocked by another difference - in Iraq, journalists were now becoming victims of the violence that was churning throughout the country.
So when Filkins' Iraqi driver came in to inform him that some men in the parking lot were talking about killing him because he was an American, Filkins quickly left the restaurant.
Back in his homeland, on a train from Washington DC to New York, Filkins, 47, recalls the moment when he realised that Iraq was moving ever closer to the abyss.
"What happened was that it changed very rapidly ... It just became very, very dangerous for us," Filkins says.
"By mid 2004, we stopped travelling outside of Baghdad almost entirely on our own. It had become apparent by late 2003 that we were targets ourselves."
He had an earlier death threat, in a different war: a few years earlier, reporting on the rise of the Taleban in Afghanistan, he was dragged from a taxi and had a gun held to his head.
For the past 10 years, Filkins, who has been called the greatest war correspondent of his generation, has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the city streets and rural villages where they are waged.
After being sent to India to cover the sub-continent by the Los Angeles Times in 1997, Filkins began his first trips to Afghanistan, before going on to cover the initial stages of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Filkins has written about his experiences as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan in the critically acclaimed The Forever War.
It draws on a decade of work in the world's most dangerous places. The result is a searing, devastating and unfiltered view of war's savagery.
Filkins first witnessed the Taleban's stranglehold upon parts
of Afghanistan in 1998. As a guest
spectator to a public amputation in a soccer stadium in Kabul, which served as a "warm-up" to a sharia law-dictated revenge execution, he was made acutely aware of a revolution's tendency to devour its own.
"Afghanistan was an interesting story, but it really wasn't a place that anybody cared about," Filkins says. "The world, you know, had pretty much written off Afghanistan at that point."
Three years later, when two hijacked commercial planes hurtled through the early September sky above Manhattan, Afghanistan rapidly came to occupy not only a prominent place in the American public consciousness, but to define US foreign policy into the foreseeable future.
On a personal level, the events of 9/11 would also lead Filkins back to Afghanistan, where he filed stories on the country's complicated tribal structure and political alliances, and eventually take him to the post-invasion carnage in the streets of Baghdad.
Filkins was in New York when the attacks on the Twin Towers occurred. And when he sat down to write he dedicated a chapter to describing his experiences in New York. After managing to get aboard one of the ferries that were travelling between Manhattan and several other boroughs of New York City, Filkins made his way to Ground Zero. It was there, as he writes in The Forever War, that he was confronted with the feeling of returning to the Third World.
"In the Third World, this sort of thing happened every day: earthquakes, famines, plagues ..," Filkins writes. "This was mass murder, that was clear, it was an act of evil. Though I'd seen that, too: the forty thousand dead in Kabul."
Filkins's journalistic eye is unblinking as he guides the reader through his memories of 9/11. He describes seeing an intestine on the pavement, and wonders if it had come "from one of the airplane passengers, or from one of the people inside the buildings. Or even, against the odds, from one of the hijackers".
Filkins later relays a conversation he had with a middle-aged Irish fireman who was looking for survivors amongst the rubble - the fireman says that he and others were "seeing a lot of spinal cords".
While his memories of 9/11 make up a brief part of The Forever War, the attacks against the US were a catalyst in his career.
"After I left the sub-continent in 2000 and came back to New York, I was covering the Bronx," Filkins says, with a laugh. "Then 9/11 came, and [going back to Afghanistan] was kind of a natural fit because I had been there before. I've kind of been riding this gigantic wave, but I can't really say that at any point I set out to try and cover war."
Filkins began his career at the Miami Herald. He admits that while he always wanted to go abroad, when he was working as a reporter in Dade County covering everything from crime to local council meetings, the life of foreign correspondent seemed like a distant prospect.
"Then the opportunity came to go to India [for the LA Times], a country that was considered a bit of a backwater at a time - which was frankly the reason why I was able to go," Filkins says.
It was the break that Filkins needed. By 2007, at the end of what he calls the "10-year arc" reporting from some of the world's most dangerous places, Filkins found himself with a massive amount of material (more than 500 notebooks), memories, photographs, and access to sources that compelled him to give "the essence" of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But with the numerous books about Iraq published over the past five years, most of which, Filkins says, are "written from 10,000 feet up", it is the politics and decision-making behind the war that inevitably come to the forefront. Filkins was determined to avoid this.
"I didn't want to make an argument [about Iraq and Afghanistan]; I'm exhausted by that - what went wrong, and how it all happened, and all of that," he says. "I wanted to write ... a more visceral and essential book."
Filkins says that he knew from his first day in the country - he had crossed the border in a rental car on the same day as the coalition troops - the situation was out of control.
"It was like we had pried the doors off of a mental institution," Filkins says. "It was a deeply, deeply traumatised place.
"And it was so apparent to me on that first day that whatever preconceptions I had of the place I had to get rid of - they were just useless in trying to understand Iraq."
One of the threads between the vignettes in his book is the notion of the "two conversations" that were going on in Iraq: one between the Iraqis and the Americans, and one between the Iraqis themselves.
"Iraq [comes from] an ancient civilisation that has been around for 4000 years, and it's going to go its own way and do its own thing," Filkins says. "It was easy to think - if you were a journalist or diplomat - that we are the big guys on the block, and we are going to take this country in a particular direction, but that's just so much hubris. Iraq is its own country."
His book has an incredible cast of characters, made all the more vivid by the knowledge that they are real. Filkins recalls interactions with individuals from all sides of the conflict: including the disgraced Army Colonel Nathan Sassaman, whose soldiers had forced Iraqis into the Tigris River at night, to Abu Marwa, the former Iraqi Army captain who became involved in the Islamic Army, one of the "busiest" insurgent groups in Iraq, and who declared war on al Qaeda.
"[When we met] Abu Marwa we were sitting in this house and listening to this guy - who was ordinarily blowing up American Humvees - tell us this bizarre story about going after al Qaeda ... and [deciding] whether or not I could tell if he was telling us the truth," Filkins says. "I wanted to get all of that down [in The Forever War]."
For now, Filkins is returning to Afghanistan, the country where he made his name as a foreign correspondent, to report on the war that will be the primary emphasis in the foreign policy of President-elect Barack Obama.
Despite the improvements in quality of life he saw in his most recent trips to Iraq, he warns against easy comparisons between Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I think they are catastrophes to be managed," Filkins says. "But maybe, over time, some structure in Afghanistan and Iraq can emerge, but I do think that we are a while away from that."
As for his own future, Filkins is not sure what lies ahead.
"I have had a bit of trouble re-engaging [in American life] so I'm not really sure if I want to keep on going back to war-zones," Filkins says. "But I'll figure that out eventually."
The effects of war, Filkins says, are with everyone who goes there, whether Iraqi, Afghan, or American, soldier, reporter or diplomat.
"In a sense, we are all still in there together," Filkins says.
"It's all still very alive with me."
The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror by Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Cape ($37.99)
