War Reporter Engages Bookstore Audience

New York Times foreign correspondent for Dexter Filkins brought the image of the war-torn Middle East to Cambridge last night, with his vivid description of walking into an Afghan town with celebrating Northern Alliance soldiers who believed the Taliban had evacuated. “It was a double cross,” Filkins said nonchalantly, “we nearly didn’t make it out alive.” Then he moved on to tell another harrowing story.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the George Polk award, Filkins, who joined The Times in 2001 after reporting in Afghanistan for The Los Angeles Times, spoke at Harvard Book Store last night to an overflowing room. His talk was part of a promotional tour for his new book “The Forever War,” an account of his experiences reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade.

Filkins, a Cambridge resident, was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy last year after he had come back from reporting in Iraq. He called his return “jarring,” stating that Cambridge is “sort of all the things that Baghdad is not.”

Aided by a slide show of photographs, Filkins spoke of being in Afghanistan before the NATO invasion, until he was arrested and expelled in the summer of 2000, and later, of shadowing a marine battalion during the invasion of Iraq.

Filkins likened the aftermath of the American army’s successful march into Baghdad to a winning football team’s loss in the fourth quarter of the game, saying that “in the space of just a couple hours, you could feel the wind go out.”

At the end of the lecture, audience member Michelle A. Payne, whose brother served in Filkins’s unit, asked Filkins about an episode in his book, in which an excursion by Filkins and his photographer resulted in the death of a marine.

Payne said her brother had criticized Filkins’s involvement in the marine’s death, and that she . She later said she was surprised that Filkins had dedicated the book to the slain soldier, for this signified his “acknowledging that there’s something he did.”

Payne said she became an avid reader of Filkins’s articles while her brother was on tour in Iraq, because she used them to keep up with news of her brother.

“The articles were really good because they said things that [her brother] would never say,” she said. “My brother would only talk about it years after.”

Other audience members were impressed with Filkins’s experiences.

“I’m going to congratulate him on surviving,” audience member Stephen B. Rice said. Another listner, Mark D. O’Connor, added “It’s people like him that keep our press free and going.”

Harvard Book Store staff member Heather L. Gain said the fact that Filkins is a loyal customer to the store was not the only reason they wanted to host the author.

“Having a first-hand account is really a crucial way for us to understand what we read in the headlines,” she said.