Every Man in This Village Is a Liar

In her journalistic memoir, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (2010), American war correspondent Megan K. Stack recounts her experiences as a journalist in the Middle East, reporting on the human consequences of the “War on Terror.” Relating the horrors of war from a personal perspective, Stack bitterly indicts Americans’ willed ignorance to the consequences of military intervention in the region. Every Man in This Village Is a Liar was nominated for the National Book Award in the non-fiction category.

Stack begins her account by explaining that she never intended to become a war correspondent. She was on vacation in Paris from her job at the Los Angeles Times when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place. As the staffer closest to the Middle East at the time, Stack was hurriedly dispatched by her editors to Afghanistan.

As she follows the spread of conflict from Afghanistan in 2001 to Iraq in 2003 and on to Lebanon in 2005, Stack diagnoses the failures of American policy in the Middle East, particularly criticizing American alliances with the despotic regimes of North Africa and Saudi Arabia.



Stack advances the thesis that the war on terror “never really existed.” She argues that the so-called war was little more than a convenient illusion, “a way for Americans to convince ourselves that we were still strong and correct.” In her reporting from Afghanistan, she emphasizes the incoherence of American military and political efforts. For example, she portrays Afghan warlords who accepted American money to combat al Qaeda but used it to fund their wars with one another, while allowing al Qaeda fighters to slip across the border to Pakistan, for a fee. Stack demonstrates than in country after country, America’s unfocused violence has left only broken infrastructure, broken political systems, and a perfect breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalism. Stack decries the ignorance and apathy of American voters, as well as the corruption and cruelty of Arab statesmen.

Alongside this big-picture political argument, Stack offers compelling and personal portraits of the human experience of war. She argues that to distinguish between the survivors and the dead is to misunderstand war. Instead, many or most victims of war exist in a space between “surviving and not surviving,” their lives rent by trauma, cut short by a total lack of options. While acknowledging her relative safety as a reporter who can “soak up the local color” before returning home, Stack describes the traumatic impact of witnessing a suicide attack on her own life: “It doesn’t take long, once you have been cut by what you’ve seen…It takes a lot of strength to stop. It doesn’t matter anymore why you went at first; now you are bound to stay. The importance of it gets inside of you.”

Stack compiles many and varied perspectives, speaking to Afghan fighters, young Libyan rebels, the ordinary people of Iraq and Lebanon, and American expats living cozily in the Saudi Aramco compound. She meets the victims of a terrorist attack in Megiddo, Israel, some refugees from the American invasion of Iraq and the Islamic freedom fighters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.



Throughout, Stack underlines the costs of war and ongoing violence on these lives. This theme culminates in her report from the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in 2007. She describes elderly people and poor people left with nothing, bodies ripped apart by bomb blasts, hospitals destroyed, people killed as they flee. She points out that this bomb attack, which was intended to suppress the Islamic group Hezbollah, only created a new generation of enraged avengers in Lebanon.

Stack also reports on subtler forms of suffering. She describes the despair of young people in the Middle East, left to make their way in a country without resources, without work, without freedoms. She follows Ahmed, a young Iraqi who simply jogs for hours across his home city, “until the flesh burned off his bones,” because he has nothing else to do. Stack also reports on the suffering of “invisible women” across the Middle East, including in Saudi Arabia, a country sponsored and supported by the U.S. Stack herself is forced out of the “men’s side” of a Starbucks in the Saudi city of Riyadh.

An extra layer of personal depth comes from Stack’s experience of loss. Time and again, the people she meets end up dead. In some cases, she has to wonder whether they died for speaking to her, whether she “took a chance with their lives.” The son of her Arabic translator is shot to death by U.S. soldiers.



The climax of Stack’s book is a plea to readers in the U.S. and other countries militarily involved in the Middle East: “Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do. You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.”