“What do any of us really know about Afghanistan?” the editors of this volume ask in their preface. Readers looking for answers to why Canada is involved, and how this faraway land continues to be treated as a geopolitical punching bag, will need to look elsewhere.

What’s on offer here instead is a collection of personal letters and blog entries from soldiers, medical personnel, aid workers, and journalists (some of whom, eerily, are now casualties of the war). Refreshingly, however, most of the material is raw and evocative, infused in equal parts with pain, sadness, and the kind of rage only a war zone can elicit. There are also warnings for what is to come: one piece speaks to the difficulties faced by veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Other writings capture the surreal nature of a counterinsurgency war, from the middle-of-the-night summons to bid farewell to caskets carrying home fallen soldiers, to the scene of Canadian grunts on a hilltop cheering for the “sound of raw, awesome destruction” during an aerial bombing raid.

Interestingly, many of these writers, like Canadians at home, are sometimes conflicted about their role overseas. But underlying their pieces is a disturbing fact: even though they are in Afghanistan, these folks on the front line, who are in no way lacking in sensitivity and compassion, nonetheless seem no better informed about the politics of the occupation than their loved ones at home. While these writings will go a long way to dispelling the negative stereotypes that exist about bloodthirsty soldiers, readers with a slightly critical eye will recognize the Kipling-esque manner in which all involved parrot the line that what they are doing is ultimately bringing good to a scary, foreign land of violence, betrayal, darkness, and evil.

It is perhaps this that prevents the book from tackling some of the issues that have made the Afghan occupation controversial, from prisoner transfers to torture to civilian casualties of coalition bombing raids. Instead, Afghanistan is reduced to a mysterious phenomenon that has sucked in unwitting Canadians, rather than a deliberate foreign policy choice on the part of the Canadian government.

This also prevents the collection from including the one key voice that always seems to be missing when we consider the “participants” in the war: the Afghan people themselves. Without them, those overseas are no closer to a solution than when this round of misery began.