The 'Fire' this time: Sebastian Junger takes us to the world's hot spots, including Afghanistan

Sebastian Junger's book "The Perfect Storm" was born out of his desire to write about men and women who take risks as they work for their living. Junger has certainly made the big bucks from "Storm," but success has only seemed to stoke his determination to risk his own neck.

His new book, "Fire" (Norton, $23.95), is a collection of Junger's exemplary magazine journalism. One of the pieces, "The Forensics of War," won a National Magazine Award. And his piece on the murdered Afghan warrior and Taliban enemy Ahmad Shah Massoud achieves the eerie resonance of a dispatch that foretells history.

Junger is a fearless reporter and understated writer who lets his hard-won facts do the work. The "Fire" collection begins with two pieces on forest-fire fighters, then achieves a mounting momentum as it visits places where civilization and fundamentalism — religious and political — are in collision.

Author reading Sebastian Junger will read from "Fire" at 7 p.m. Thursday at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Ticket required; available free from University Book Store, 206-634-3400.

There's a piece on Donald Hastings, the Spokane physician kidnapped and presumably killed by Muslim guerrillas in Kashmir. There are reports on the war zones of Kosovo and Sierra Leone, where children kidnapped into soldiering are now teenagers cranked up on dope and ready to perform mass amputations at a moment's notice. Finally, "Fire" throws us into the conflagration that has engulfed us all, in his piece on Massoud, "The Lion in Winter."

I spoke with Junger recently to get his thoughts on how Americans can come to terms with the fact that so much of the world's people hate us.

Junger spent weeks following Massoud, the Mujahedeen leader who drove the Soviets from Afghanistan and who, until his death, led the fight against the Taliban. Junger calls Massoud a visionary: "He stood out not so much because he was handsome as simply because he was hard to stop looking at," he writes.

"I sat around and watched him work," Junger said. "It was like watching the conductor of the London Philharmonic. ... He was like a great grey athlete who just can't figure out why the team cannot put the ball into the hands of the guy right down the field."

The rebel leader was killed last month by two Taliban agents posing as journalists. Junger heard about Massoud's death from a friend in Paris. "I just felt hopeless. I grieved for him, the Afghans, and the future for all of us."

Though he's less despairing now, he said Americans must absorb the fact that they are the enemy for much of the Third World, and confront the reasons why.

"We have to learn to see ourselves through the eyes of an 18-year-old Afghan refugee living in a tent in 120-degree weather," he said, describing the inhabitants of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border camps where the Taliban get their recruits. "He's got diarrhea from drinking river water. Then let him watch TV for half an hour" with its bloated images of Western life. "It's easy for a lunatic like bin Laden to portray it as a David and Goliath battle."

The camps are there because America financed and armed the Afghans' war against the Soviet Union, and then walked away from the civil chaos that ensued after the Russians pulled out, says Junger.

"The U.S. poured $3 billion worth of weapons into Afghanistan into the hands of the Mujahedeen. Because of their success, a million Afghans died in this war. If we had supported the peace the way we supported the war, we could have brought Afghanistan into the community of nations."

Junger was greatly moved by the beauty of Afghanistan and the hospitality of its people.

But it's an "anarchic hell," he said, "ridden with warlords. Infant mortality is 25 percent. Life expectancy is 45 years. Of course, fanaticism and extremism breed in apocalyptic conditions."

If the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks have brought home anything to Americans, Junger said, it's that what happens in such distant places as Afghanistan matters very much indeed.

There are many moments in "Fire" that will give you a jolt, scenes of understated horror such as an image of thousands of leftover syringes in a rebel compound in Sierra Leone, piled in the corners "like drifted snow."

Junger says he'll continue to go to such places.

"I and other journalists have the power and responsibility to get the word out and make it broadly known that there are people suffering in the world. And suffering for very particular political reasons, in situations that could have been prevented and could be brought to a halt if the West makes an unnegotiable commitment to helping."

"It's awe inspiring. Sometimes it's very, very scary. But it always feels important."

Mary Ann Gwinn's column on books and reading appears the first Sunday of each month. She can be reached at 206-464-2557. E-mail: mgwinn@seattletimes.com.