Critical Review - The Afghan Campgain by Steven Pressfield

Critical Review

The Afghan Campaign by Steven Pressfield

Pressfield has made a name for himself with a very impressive body of work describing the wars of Classical Greece. Beginning with the Battle of Thermopylae (The Gates of Fire), moving to the Athenian Empire (The Tides of War) and then the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon (The Virtues of War), Pressfield has been able to capture the classical mind in all of its logic and reason set against the backdrop of the most visceral and anarchic descriptions of war this side of the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. His work is excellent; his scholarship impeccable. One of the inspiring things about Pressfield’s corpus is his ability to create bestselling work out of so arcane a subject as the classical world. War novels have always sold moderately well but there is no shortage of them on the bookshelves; to carve oneself a place on these crowded shelves is no small feat. To do so with works that are steeped and infused with classical language and philosophy is even more impressive. That they are bestsellers… not only is this a testament to the skill of Pressfield but gives us hope for the literate public when seeing authors like Dan Brown and Michael Crichton on the bestseller lists.

Still, these novels have, heretofore, been novels that require an audience that is at the very least aware that the classical world existed. They also required a bit of patience: Pressfield loves to work intricately framed first-person narratives into his novels that can be difficult and off-putting to the casual reader. He does this, we feel, to comment about the slippery nature of historical work in these times where historians are forced to piece together fragments of text, first-hand accounts, and generation-old recollections of long-past times haphazardly written down. Pressfield’s framing with its leaps in time and place, emotional coloring in the writing, and present-day events crowded with images of the past all give a literary taste to the audience of the problems facing expert historians. It’s extremely interesting to compare the “fictional” account of Pressfield’s soldier against the non-fiction of expert history… which is, after all, in many cases the recollections of stories told by soldiers. That is cool. But no matter how cool that is, the period and the framing are two daunting aspects that restrict wide-spread general acceptance of the work.

The Afghan Campaign represents a complete triumph as a book because it retains its flavor of war and the ancient world but puts to rest both of these two concerns. By placing his new novel in Afghanistan—with Alexander operating as a bringer of civilization (admittedly, by the sword)—Pressfield takes the setting out of the purely classical and brings it forward to us in these times of war where when American troops are, today, still carrying out operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (presumably bringing civilization by the bomb). The publishers are quick to seize on this fact by quoting Vince Flynn (political thriller novelist) on the book jacket: “This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to better understand what American and Coalition forces are up against in one of history’s most tribal and troubled regions.” We hate author quotes on book jackets but on this one Flynn is largely correct.

The other problem of framed narratives is something that Pressfield has apparently abandoned. The Virtues of War were told in the first-person of Alexander himself bringing an immediacy and urgency to the text. Yet there is still a removal in time and some lurches from past to present—not taxing for the Pressfield initiate but off-putting to the mainstream. Here, The Afghan Campaign is told in a forthright—occasionally even brusque—manner by soldier Matthias. It makes for a gripping and—important for a mainstream audience—logical read that can appeal to a much, much broader audience than what earlier audiences could appreciate. We expect this book to be every bit the bestseller that his other books and exceed them a great deal in sales.

Matthias arrives from Macedon a completely green soldier. He has taken part in no battle before and has been sent forward to join his older brothers in the armies of Alexander. They expect to subdue these northern realms of Persia (Afghanistan) in a season and then march on to India and the sea. Some of the tropes will seem familiar to war stories: the novice arriving at the front with that strange brew of fear and anticipation, the ironic mockery (tinged with personal envy) of the veterans, and some laughably absurd escapades. Yet already there is something different here and that something is very relevant to this modern day. The veterans talk about how the war has changed—this is a different war than the “honorable” one they fought against Darius. This war will be filled with civilian concerns, long-chases, and guerilla campaigns. “The foe,” as they are called throughout the novel, are terrifying because they will not meet in the open field of battle, they are as likely to be women and children as male soldiers, they smile as they sell you goods and then betray you and kill you at night. The war has changed wholly for these starry-eyed Macedonians, for Alexander himself, and they all hate it. These people bred to war have come to hate the war. Here Lucas discusses this fact with the war-correspondent equivalent in Costas:

“Do you know what I hate about you wax-scratchers?” Lucas addresses the writer in a tone I have never heard from his gentle soul. “It’s the phony phrases you use to make this shit sound like it makes sense”….

“What phrases?” Costas asks.

“’Subdued the region,’” answers Lucas. “That’s a beauty. I love that one.”…

The phrase Lucas hates most, he says, is “put to death.”

“What the hell does that mean? That we tapped these sheep-stealers on the shoulder and they slipped off to slumber? I hate the Afghan, he is a beast and a coward. But what I hate most is he has dragged us down to his level. Can you defend the massacres we enact, Flag? Is this Macedonian honor?”

There is nothing new about a soldier announcing that he hates what he’s become or question why he is any better than the enemy. What is different, is that these are Macedonians. These are people raise to war and cherish the notion of following Alexander across the world. That these people question the war—these soldiers who took Persia by the sword, ransacked a civilization, and triumphantly and happily quit the field with plunder in gold and slaves should hate themselves and a war is saying something. It’s like a klingon saying he hates to fight. Pressfield’s talent lies in making this old idea sound astonishing and new when uttered by Matthias and his brothers-in-arms.

Pressfield has always been good at describing the terror of war at a deeply personal level. His descriptions of the sort of guerilla combat so prevalent today is immensely powerful. It takes many forms. It takes the above form in contempt for the media portrayal of it. It presents itself in how it forces one to fight—against civilians, against children, and against each other. It comes out of the speeches of Alexander himself who at one point in the novel announces in his most strenuous terms to his officers that there is one phrase he doesn’t want to hear any more: “Pockets of resistance.” There will be no more pockets of resistance… we will overcome them all! Most of all, the terror comes from “the foe” itself—how they continually baffle the Macedonians with their culture, their ideas of honor and their willingness to violence.

This bafflement comes in the form of Shinar, a woman whom Matthias meets and falls in love with over the course of the campaign. She is Afghan… and he attempts to understand her and through her the country in which he fights. They are lovers of freedom, we are assured. They are bandits, as everyone admits (and incorrigible liars). They treat their women in all manner of disregard yet fiercely pursue vengeance against foreigners who show them affection. They brutalize prisoners yet enlist with Alexander for wages. At the end of the novel, Matthias is no nearer to understanding the nation than he was three years earlier when he came to the “front.”

The transformation of Matthias himself is the achievement of the novel. He struggles with his own fear, he struggles with what he finds himself capable of, he struggles with his relationship with his fiancé in Macedon. He struggles with his feelings towards his older brothers. At the end of the book, when he finds himself a hardened (and decorated) veteran, he is amazed that he is entering his first conventional battle and that he—an officer with medals of distinction, battle scars, and long years of fighting—is as new to the true field of battle as the rawest recruit. A long veteran of a 3 years of guerilla battle, he has never been to war.

Matthias also embodies perfectly those strange peculiarities of war. That moment when, going into battle for the first time, you realize that these people are trying to kill us! Those moments of change where the boy burns into something not a man but a hardened, lethal, boy-child. There is a wildness of the situation. One gets carried away in the committing of atrocities… that flashpoint where the shame and the peer pressure and the exhilaration and the plundering crest in that wave of emotion that carries one forward in the mob. There are few novels that can match this one in capturing those moments.

This is one of the finest novels of war we have ever read. Our highest praise is to compare it to Sharra’s The Killer Angels (American civil war novel of Picket’s Charge). Are there any flaws in this book? In some measure, we feel like Pressfield didn’t quite take the time necessary to fully develop the emotional aspects. The pacing of the novel is peculiar: many years of struggles where we get fine detail over some events yet find the book abbreviated somehow… and we miss the full impact of the war that Matthias feels. Perhaps he was restricted by length of publication. Perhaps he was rushed to get it on the shelves while the controversial War in Iraq still raged (little to fear there since, as of this writing, it shows no sign of abatement). It is not quite the miraculous book that those greatest novels are. Still, it is a great novel. Far, far superior to the great rash of Vietnam War books that populate the shelves… and a great deal more enlightening.

Title: The Afghan Campaign

Author: Steven Pressfield

Publisher: Doubleday Publishing

Length: 351 pages in hardcover

Topic: historical fiction account of Alexander the Great’s foray into Afghanistan after his victory over Persian king Darius.