Every Man In This Village Is A Liar by Megan Stack

From The Week of July 18, 2010

Megan Stack, a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, may nod now and again in the direction of journalistic impartiality, but as she exposes in this, her memoir of her war-zone work since 2001, there are times when lies and corruption are too much for her to take. The alternating currents of burning passion and depressive cynicism which run through her work imbue it with raw and aching intensity, but at what cost to Ms. Stack's soul I wonder. For it's clear, in Every Man In This Village Is A Liar, that there are some sights and some lies that cut far too deep for anyone to handle.

Vacationing in Paris, Megan Stack woke up on the morning of September 11th, 2001, to the world-changing event which launched the War on Terror. A short time later, 25 years old, and with no formal training in such conflict, she was in Afghanistan, covering a war that wasn't really a war. Even so, it would last years, sending Ms. Stack from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It would send her into some of the most dangerous places on Earth, subject her to the most authoritarian regimes, obligate her to witness the most terrible things, all the while knowing that there were no, and would be no, clean skins in a war on nothing more substantial than an idea. And in this, Ms. Stack grasps the central lie of the War on Terror, that it will never end. Victory cannot be declared over terror! This is nothing less than a path towards the State of permanent war, divorcing it from righteousness and logic. With each depraved discovery, Ms. Stack seems to slip deeper and deeper into anger and despair, a witness to the unfolding of a thing too big for any normal person to halt. And it tears her up even as she tries to put a face on a part of the world that few of us understand.

There's a tortured grace about Ms. Stack's work that calls to mind Roberto Saviano. There's a sense, throughout, that she will burn out, that she might have already, that she'd stop if she could, but that this story needs to be told. For every lash the reader receives in reading the account, Ms. Stack endured ten to tell it. The lyricism here firmly plants Ms. Stack in the camp of narrative journalism which will always encourage questions concerning how much a piece has been massaged to fit the story. But whatever it loses in absolute truth it more than makes up for in crackling emotion, the likes of which will not soon be forgotten. (4/5 Stars)