Dexter Filkins was a reporter for the Miami Herald, then the New Delhi bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and, from 2000, a reporter in New York, a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan for The New York Times. He was based in that papers Iraq bureau from 2003 to 2006.

Filkins was imbedded with Marines as they stormed Fallujah to overthrow Muqtada al Sadr’s army in 2004; he was at a soccer field in Kabul, before 9/11, where he bore witness to an execution and amputation carried out by the Taliban; he was also at the World Trade Center on that fateful day when lower Manhattan resembled, for a moment, the war-torn countries from which he had been reporting.

THE FOREVER WAR is not about what went right or wrong, or what happened when. “If my book is about anything,” Filkins says, “it’s about the reality on the ground. Down there, politics is irrelevant.” THE FOREVER WAR reveals the human essence of America’s confrontations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It captures the experiences of the people involved, from face-to-face meetings with insurgents, dinners in Iraqi homes, interviews conducted on the front lines in Afghanistan with Northern Alliance soldiers, and with American troops both in Iraq and after their return to the United States.