from TRIAGE, a novel by Scott Anderson. Scribner. 235 pp. $23.

Anderson, who has covered wars around the globe, is a contributing editor to Harper's.

Mark no longer read about war zones where he had been; now these places only interested him before he went and while he was there. Because if he had learned one thing over the past nine years, it was that most modern wars did not end. They continued for generations, heating up at times, cooling down at others, but the flames never went out. How many articles about the latest Mideast peace talks or Belfast bombing or Kashmiri uprising could a person be asked to read in the course of a lifetime? Who had the strength of heart to stay passionate about the struggle for a free Tibet or an independent Sahrawi or a score of other causes around the globe, causes that were lost now and would still be so in fifty years?

For Mark, war had become a job, and when stripped of its grim romanticism, what this job seemed to most closely resemble was speculating on the stock market. To prosper, one had to guess which wars would rise in public interest, which would wane. Which war was headed for a spike, a crisis that would draw American diplomatic involvement or, even better, armed intervention? The war industry even had its blue chips and its penny stocks, the bush wars no one cared about that ground on in anonymity until the day one side perpetrated a particularly grand atrocity. The photographer or journalist who saw it coming and went in at the right moment could make a fortune. The key to picking wars, as with picking stocks, was in reading the trends, knowing when to buy in and when to bail out.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe