Richard Engel
‘War Journal’ by NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent, Richard Engel, chronicles his five years as a reporter in Iraq with all the gory details that urban counterinsurgency entails. What stood out to me was how Engel tells a very personal account of the war, full of rich anecdotes and his own ruminations, and yet manages to write it in a way that teaches a great deal about the broader ongoing forces that have defined the Iraq War- forces such as the 1,500 year Shi’a Sunni animosity, rising Iranian influence, and an overstretched and poorly organized American invasion.
While commentators talk about rising Persian influence as a given, Engel gets into the nitty gritty details and stories that are so important for reaching a more nuanced understanding. He describes how Iran had prepared thousands of boxes full of silverware and other home goods to be distributed to newly married Shi’ite couples in Southern Iraq and how Iran had provided funding for educational assistance and computer training for Southern Shi’as. At the other end of the spectrum, he depicts American soldiers thrown into a foreign land with a lack of reinforced humvee armor and sometimes little ability to cope with the anarchy and recklessness of war.
What also stands out about the book is how unvarnished, gory, frightening, and real some of his encounters were. Engel leaves nothing out, including seeing nine year old girls leave Iraq as refugees, forced to take up dancing and prostitution in Damascus; being ambushed several times by insurgents and militias; as well as seeing a dead Iraqi on the side of the road after an American tank had rolled over and crushed his body, forcing his small intestine and other organs out of his body.
Before reading this book, the idea of working as a journalist in Iraq had some hesitant appeal to me; after reading it, I can’t even imagine myself experiencing what Richard Engel has gone through and more importantly, survived to write about.