Every Man in This Village is a Liar - book

Every Man in This Village is a Liar, an Education in War, by Megan K. Stack (Doubleday, 2010)

Megan K. Stack is an award winning reporter and nominee for a Pulitzer Prize who reported on terrorism and war in the Middle East for at least seven years. From 2001 until the present she has had experience in twenty-two countries and was for a time most recently Moscow bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. At twenty-five she found herself almost by accident in Afghanistan and from there moved from country to country including Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, and others. She had no experience as a war correspondent when she began. This book is her account of war in the Middle East as she personally experienced and learned about it.

If you are squeamish about bloodshed, bodies blown to bits, death, and misery on a scale that cannot be measured you should not read this book. Stack pulls no punches, she writes objectively of what she experienced, what she learned, what she took away, and how it has affected her. It is not a pretty picture she offers, but tales of almost non-stop and mostly untold murder, torture, and suffering. In the process she manages to explain fairly well the political and economic reasons for the conflicts in these various countries. Through personal interviews with ordinary citizens in the Middle East she is able to present their views of the conflict as well as the official versions. She also writes respectfully of those she met who worked with her as interpreters, photographers, drivers, bodyguards, and others, some of whom disappeared or were killed, probably in some cases merely because they were seen talking with her.

Although she does not dwell on it, she speaks of the problems she encountered as a woman trying to interview and deal with men in the Middle East. As a woman she also deals at some length with the women she met, the problems they encounter on a day-to-day basis, the question of the birka, headscarves, not being able to drive or travel without a husband or a male relative, and how they feel about such things. She points out that many of these customs are virtually timeless and are not going to change, certainly not in the near future.

Megan Stack was not a reporter who merely stationed herself in hotels and had informants brought to her. She traveled widely with great difficulty and experienced much of the fighting and bloodshed first hand. Her accounts of driving through the bombed out countries are vividly realistic and convey the constant fear involved, fear of being captured, or more importantly, bombed. It was the almost incessant bombing that everyone seemed to fear the most, the planes were virtually always above, like sharks in the water, and would bomb indiscriminately. The people were helpless against such attacks and everyone knew they could easily be victims at any moment.

Perhaps the finest part of the book deals with the Israeli attack on Lebanon while she was in that unfortunate country. Her description of the terrible destruction wrought by Israel, the massive destruction of virtually everything in the country, including even hospitals and ambulances, their futile attempt to cripple Hezbollah at all costs, that ended up with Hezbollah victorious and boasting they were the first to defeat the Israelis in battle. It is clear from her account that Hezbollah can never be destroyed by Israel because it is such an integral part of the Lebanese community and most of the citizens support them as their only protection from further Israeli attacks.

There is no reason to believe that Stack wrote her book as an anti-American tirade. It is pretty clear that at first she was in favor of American intervention and believed in the “cause” (whatever it was). It is equally clear that she was terribly disillusioned and came to realize the horror of it all. The “Village” in the title must be seen as a metaphor for the world community, a community in which everyone lies and the mayhem and murder continues unabated. As for her experience, she says “it is possible to survive and not survive at the same time.”

At first I was somewhat put off by her prose style that seemed to me at times to be not very compatible with her subject matter, but I eventually concluded that the occasional lapses into poetic description may well have been the only thing to keep her sane throughout her traumatic and difficult times. This is not your run-of-the-mill account of war and is well worth reading.