Lost at War

A journalist’s search for purpose in a murky war
Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War, by Megan K. Stack. Knopf Doubleday, 2010. $26.95, 257 pp.
Americans, most of whom are not at war in any meaningful sense, are somehow war-weary from a decade of violence that is totally distant from them. Here to reconnect us with the reality of the last nine years is Los Angeles Times journalist Megan Stack in her new book, Every Man in this Village is a Liar. Recounting her experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories, Stack explores the war on terror through the eyes of those who have experienced the violence most directly.
The Fog of War

What emerges from Stack’s tales is a convoluted web of self-deception: a war that is “essentially nothing but a unifying myth for a complicated scramble of mixed impulses and social theories and night terrors and cruelty and business interests.” In lucid and gripping prose, Stack tells of lives defined and ruined by the hypocrisies and illusions of war.
Though there are some more typical warfare narratives, her book tells the stories, above all, of two types of people: those who capitalize on power during war and those who exist in a kind of purgatory, who “survive and not survive, both at the same time.” Despite their differences, neither class is spared Stack’s critical eye.
Power and Hypocrisy
Stack’s contempt comes through most clearly in the sardonic and disaffected prose with which she describes her encounters with the power brokers of the war on terror. Western and Middle Eastern authority figures alike deliberately manipulate the ways in which they themselves and those under them perceive the war. American administrations claiming to promote democracy worldwide prop up a dictator in Libya, turn a blind eye to election violence in Egypt, and use war-torn Yemen for the legally questionable detainment of suspected terrorists. A qat-addicted Yemeni judge boasts of holding conciliatory dialogues with Houthi rebels one week, then denies that the rebellion even exists the next.
In Afghanistan, Stark struggles to evade the overt come-ons of an Afghan warlord more concerned with the arrival of American taxpayer money than with hunting al-Qaeda. Her extensive exposure of corruption and hypocrisy starkly contrast with government reports on “local partnerships.”
Surviving, But Not Surviving

Even more compelling are Stack’s portraits of lives lived on a thin boundary between life and death. In Afghanistan, we meet teenage Afghan mujaheddin who are “stoned on hash and… war,” on the front lines of a war they did not start. Like so many in her book, they have been educated in war, but not math or reading.
As she moves from Afghanistan to Iraq, she meets the “living martyr” Hussein Safar, who survived a mass execution at the hands of the Iraqi police in 1991, only to be shot dead in 2005, hours after testifying before a national court about the incident. Even these victims are not immune to the bug of self-deception. Time and again, people choose to ignore or distort the violence rather than to face its realities. In the Middle East, Stack finds victims of war who chide the United States for not doing enough to bring peace to the region, but who refuse to question their own regimes. In America, she finds citizens convinced that they are warriors abroad, but who are victims at home. The delusions among the victims of war intensify her disdain for the hypocrisy and deception of those with the power to actually stop the bloodshed.
Anecdotes and Editorials

These intimate narratives are Stack’s unquestioned strength, as they offer rare glimpses of the incalculable human costs of war, costs rarely discussed in the mainstream media and political discourse.
Given how visceral and striking these stories are, Stack perhaps would have been better off to let them speak for themselves. At times, her editorial voice overpowers and clouds the stories she wants to share. She seems so determined to condemn America for “chasing phantoms” in a war “without a coherent system, or a philosophy, or a strategy” that she occasionally stretches her interpretation of her experiences beyond what she has actually shown.
Her outrage, however, is readily understandable. She has, after all, spent the last eight years of her life among lives fractured and destroyed by a war initially directed at an abstract noun, but claiming very real victims, with no end in sight.
Taylor Helgren ’11 is a Staff Writer.