I watched the movies “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” hoping to learn more about the wars and culture in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

I did.

But I learned more about them from reading “The Forever War” by New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins and hoped to find out if, with American troops withdrawing from Afghanistan, it really does mean the war is over for us. 

Filkins takes the reader on a ride of his experiences throughout the war. Some of it is gruesome. Some of it was mundane, if you can imagine anything in a war zone to be so, such as “I was out for a run, jogging along the trail of the banks of the Tigris, heading south.”

Overall, the wars are a mess, to say it politely. It is worse than that in that there’s no end in sight.

The chapter that struck me the most included a list of 103 insurgent groups claiming responsibility for attacks on Americans and Iraqis between May and October 2005. Who knows if there truly are 103 groups, groups using more than one name or more than 103 groups. They could also be fighting each other, too. At least some of them probably are, with the average number of attacks on Americans each day for the week ending Oct. 7 being 106.

From a reporter’s point of view, Filkins’s book gave insight about how difficult it is to get good, accurate information in a war zone. He is “embedded” with soldiers on combat missions and eats at local restaurants. Often, the other patrons in the restaurants all stop talking and stare at him and the photographer he is working with.

He gives the narrative an interesting close by recording epitaphs written on tombstones in British cemeteries from 1918. 

To me, Filkins is saying The Forever War is not just about the current wars, but also about how war and violence have endlessly been a part of that region of the world and won’t stop anytime soon, unfortunately.