Emotions at war: Sebastian Junger talks about his new book, War

Sebastian Junger has, quite literally, penned his way through some of the world's most vexed issues and zones to become one of America's most renowned foreign correspondents. Long before his 1997 book The Perfect Storm earned him fame, Junger was funding his freelance forays into places such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Indeed the 48-year-old has always maintained that he prefers risky, journalistic assignments in troubled places to writing his famous books, which also include Fire and A Death in Belmont. But that all changed, Junger says, with the new book, War, which recounts his experiences embedded with US troops in Afghanistan.

'It was a very powerful experience, and I felt very plugged into something important, and personal and urgent, and I never felt that writing a book before. I had only had that feeling while breaking stories that were of real significance.'

Junger spent 14 months in Korengal valley, site of some of the most intense fighting in the current war. He was intermittently embedded with the men of the Second Platoon, part of the 173rd Airborne, between 2007 and 2008. He slept with them, dodged bullets and endured extremes of heat and cold, fear and boredom alongside them in a valley he describes in War as 'the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off'. His words proved prophetic in April this year, when, soon after he completed both War and Restrepo, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary he co-directed and co-produced with photographer Tim Hetherington, the US military decided to pull out of the Korengal. Not that military strategy is the focus of Junger's narrative.

From the outset, he wanted a non-political book. 'I wanted to understand the experience of being a soldier in a platoon of combat infantry, and if those guys had sat around talking geopolitics or the rights and wrong of the war, that would have been in the book, but they didn't and so it wasn't.' But the mere fact of this withdrawal, after five harrowing years of conflict and the deaths of countless US soldiers, gives an added poignancy to a narrative that compares with Michael Herr's groundbreaking Vietnam novel, Dispatches.