It is perhaps an unlucky moment for a book of compelling reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The economy has pushed the war to Page Two of voter concerns, and virtually everyone -- from Barack Obama, to Iraqi leaders, to President Bush -- is talking about timetables for U.S. troop withdrawals.

It would be a bad break for Dexter Filkins, and a lot of potential readers, if his vivid collection of war stories, "The Forever War," got lost amid the other dominant election issues.

Much has been written about these wars and the terrorism and misleading public relations campaign that prefigured them. Probably less has been written from the ground up to the broken rooftops where so much of the fighting has been waged. And rarely has it been conveyed with the detail and tenacity of "The Forever War."

As the New Delhi bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and later as a reporter for the New York Times, Filkins made trips into Afghanistan long before most of us had heard of the Taliban. After a prologue set in Iraq, he opens in 1998 in Kabul, at one of the Taliban's public penal rituals.

In those days, after years of war with the Soviets and tribal warlords, Afghanistan was "disconnected and irrelevant to all but itself, self-absorbed in its writhings, lost in time and to the world," Filkins writes. "It was a freak show ... a place where if you were willing to fly the distance and endure the hardships you could see with your own eyes a civilization imploded, and all the new creatures and strange philosophies it produced."

Quickly, he transitions to 2001. It's subtle genius that Filkins doesn't name the date or even the World Trade Center specifically, even though he reported at Ground Zero in the hours after the attacks. He writes of "the site" and "One Liberty Plaza," and allows one mention of "the Twin Towers," but otherwise leaves the chapter admirably brief and mysterious. We all know this part of the story and how it haunts the rest; how much more powerful it is to let that day cast its shadow in silence than to descend into cliche.

What follows, the bulk of the book, is given to Iraq and a series of vignettes recounting firefights on patrols with Marines, conversations with Iraqi and U.S. military and civilian leaders, sectarian battles, Iraqi families and American soldiers, endless insurgency bombings, all the commonplace brutality and more benign details that made up his life in Iraq for 3 1/2 years -- most of it spent outside the Green Zone.

It isn't a coherent narrative. Who could make satisifying, conclusive sense of such an experience? Filkins doesn't attempt to frame or justify or even explain much, really. And he doesn't let anyone off easy, including himself. The Iraqis are venal and generous, honest and willing to sell your life for a good payday, or any payday. Soldiers are naive and hardened, conflicted about killing and enthralled with it.

"To die for this, well, at least I will be dying for something," one Iraqi man tells Filkins as he helps a woman vote in a fledgling election. Shortly afterward, miles away, Filkins speaks to another voter. "I voted in order to prevent my country from being destroyed by its enemies," she tells him. "You -- you destroyed our country. The Americans, the British. I am sorry to be impolite. But you destroyed our country, and you called it democracy. Democracy. It is just talking."

Eric Hanson is a freelance writer in Minneapolis and a former reporter for the Star Tribune.