I Am A Soldier Too by Rick Bragg

From The Week of August 20, 2012
Though the realities of war and disease, cruelty and selfishness, bombard us with evidence to the contrary, life is a precious gift. For notwithstanding the unsubstantiated beliefs of religionists, we are all afforded but one lifetime, one chance to love and be loved, to influence and be influenced, to inspire and be inspired. This is self-evident. And yet wars are still waged, crimes still committed, sins yet spun into existence, all of which are actions that violate the principle of preciousness.

There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from this paradox, that we consider the lives of others to be cheaper than our own, that we are willing to do onto others what we would not want done to us, that we do not recognize that most enduring truth about life. That it can be taken from us in an instant, leaving us broken and bewildered on its merciless horns... Few people are more aware of this than Jessica Lynch. Mr. Bragg elaborates in this captivating biography.

On March 23rd, 2003, life as Jessica Lynch knew it was shattered. A 20-year-old private in the 507th maintenance company of the United States Army, she was part of a supply convoy, supporting the US military's invasion of Iraq, that was ambushed by enemy combatants in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. Having been lead into danger by the navigational errors of the convoy's commanding officer and the failure of other nearby military units to alert them to the danger, the convoy was trapped and cut to pieces by enemy fire which claimed the lives of dozens of US personnel. Lynch, who was riding in the back of a vehicle driven by her best friend, remembers very little of the next three hours of her life, recalling only that her weapon, the notoriously fickle M16, jammed just prior to a firefight that would claim the lives of her friends and the sanctity of her body which, over the next several hours, was subjected to torments her conscious mind cannot recall.

Ms. Lynch would come back to herself in an Iraqi hospital, being tended to by Iraqi medical practitioners, in the heart of an Iraqi city being bombed back to the stone age by American warplanes. Over the next eight days, she would lie in her hospital bed, semi-conscious, being kept alive by the Iraqis until a dramatic April 1st rescue by US special forces returned her to her family and the small town in West Virginia that she had called home for the totality of her life. Having enlisted in the military to pay for college, she could have never imagined her life being ripped apart on that fateful day in Iraq. She was a country girl, who wanted to teach elementary school. And now she was a wounded veteran of a politically tempestuous war, made, without her knowing, into a symbol of patriotism, none of which would help her to heal her many, grievous wounds of body and soul.

Published eighteen months after her sensational rescue, I Am A Soldier Too is an arresting biography. Mr. Bragg, an award-winning American journalist, is welcomed into the lives of the Lynches, recounting here not only Jessica's harrowing crucible in Iraq but the torments of her family and friends who were forced, over the eight days of her disappearance, to hang on every phone call, every shred of news, every glimmer of hope. He chronicles the town's prayers for a miracle, a miracle for a girl most of them didn't even know, prior to her being reported missing on that fateful day in March. And he captures their unrestrained joy at her rescue, an event around which her hometown rallied and celebrated, that is, until they were made aware of the severity of her circumstance.

It would be easy to criticize Mr. Bragg's account, to label it a sappy, saccharine love letter to the beautiful ideal of small-town America. But such a critic would have to have a heart of stone. For this slim volume has captured an astonishing degree of kindness, a generosity of spirit unleashed by Jessica Lynch's ordeal that easily possesses the capacity to temporarily convert the most hardened cynic into a dewy-eyed optimist. If the men and women of Palestine, West Virginia, weren't building Ms. Lynch a new, wheelchair-accessible home, they were supporting her family and throwing parades in her honor, any gesture that might ease the pain of a girl coming to grips with not only her broken body but the loss of her best friend cut down in the sands of Iraq. It is true that such communal good feeling is notoriously brief, lasting only as long as the difficulties of every day life can be set aside, but awareness of this fact does nothing to diminish the display of human solidarity that ought to make a mockery of the war that made it necessary.

From her dreams to her rehab, from Iraq to West Virginia, Mr. Bragg has put together a moving document that cannot but convince us of the preciousness of life. For not only can it be taken from us at any time, it can be broken as well, turned into brittle shards of a whole we once loved and now can only lament. Captivating work that serves as much as a reminder as an edifier... (4/5 Stars)

Sisters In War by Christina Asquith

From The Week of July 16, 2012

There can be no doubt that war is the most chaotic activity in which humanity has taken part. Its capacity to blight the land, annihilate industry, devastate families and cripple public services is spectacular and sobering, certainly sufficient the wreck once proud civilizations. It is understandable then that, notwithstanding the degree to which it advances certain technologies and philosophies, it must be a tool of last resort, a means by which the desperate and the wronged, the provoked and the beleaguered, re-adjust their circumstances. For to engage it for any less significant a purpose is to sell the innocent into a kind of unending nightmare from which their lives will never completely recover. After all, displacement and disease, joblessness and homelessness, are antithetical to a stable existence. Ms. Asquith vividly demonstrates these potent truths in this captivating work.

Helmed by an infamous despot who had famously resisted a previous effort to be ousted by the united States, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the perfect target for a wounded America needing a victory and a purpose in the post-9/11 world. Having suffered for more than a decade under stifling sanctions that plunged most of its millions of citizens into poverty, Iraq's bark had far outstripped its bite, as the Americans demonstrated when, in 2003, they invaded the oil-rich country and conquered its ruling regime in a matter of weeks. But rather than spark widespread hopes for a new, democratic Iraq, free of the burdensome shadow of Saddam Hussein's four decades of autocratic rule, this swift victory galvanized an organized and vicious insurgency which ignited a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter in hopes of sapping the will of the Coalition to fully realize their goals in the beleaguered country. For four long years, this Al-Qaeda-supported insurgency flourished, using suicide bombings to kill thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Coalition soldiers, reducing large swaths of Iraq to armed camps plagued by fear and distrust.

However much the insurgency may have been effective against the Coalition it sought to remove, it was infinitely more effective at destroying both the lives and the sense of normalcy of everyday Iraqis. As pitiless bomb attacks are paired with gruesome beheadings of aidworkers and journalists, as Iraqis cooperating with the Coalition are identified, labelled as traitors and threatened with death, Iraqi society disintegrates. Jobs are lost, families are scattered, schools are shut down and neighborhoods surrendered to extremists, realities which lead many Iraqis to depressingly conclude that they are worse off under the Coalition than they were under the cruel dictator who tortured and disenfranchised them. For the good and the bad, the earnest and the passive, the brave and the cowardly, life will never be the same.

Through the eyes of an American-Palestinian aidworker, an Iraqi journalist and an American soldier, Sisters in War allows us to watch the disaster of postwar Iraq unfold in terrifying slow motion. Imbued with the wisdom of hindsight, Ms. Asquith relates the tragic efforts of three courageous women, from entirely different backgrounds, in entirely different circumstances, to make something lastingly good come from a shattering conflict. But though armed with Coalition funds and passionate desires to make positive change, their various projects -- creating womens centers, providing basic services to Iraqi citizens, and reporting on the real news in a country newly liberated from tyranny -- self-destruct. For in this new Iraq, money and will are insufficient to overcome both the nihilism of the insurgency and the immobility of the American bureaucracy which governed the country until 2005. As a result, their goodwill, thought to be depthless, is exhausted, their spirits deflated by ignorance and inertia; truly a toxic brew.

Ms. Asquith is a talented narrative journalist. Surrendering her voice entirely to her three compelling subjects, she taps into the power of the memoir without sacrificing the journalistic framework that allows her to communicate the broad strokes of those early postwar years, covering off the key incidents for those who are less familiar with the transitional period. The resulting product is both informative and emotionally engaging. For our eyes are invariably trained on the only place that matters, the ground floor of this 21st century war and all the social decay it is responsible for.

None of this would be possible, though, without Ms. Asquith's three subjects, each of whom possess wills in proportion to their courage. Their desire to forge ahead despite having the deck stacked so heavily against them is as inspiring as the insurgency is deflating. Their hardened innocence juxtaposed with the irredeemable barbarity of the terrorists leaves the reader with a powerful portrait of war's inevitable fallout.

Masterful work... The best and worst of humanity lives in these pages. (5/5 Stars)

The Cut by George Pelecanos

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Though war produces many devastating consequences, levelling cities, ruining economies and changing the destinies of nations, perhaps it's profoundest affects are reserved for those who prosecute it. For even in this technological age, war requires warriors to fight, men and women plucked from normal lives and sent to do hellish deeds, the enduring consequences of which no amount of training can prepare them for. Their only defense is the necessity of their mission and the approval of their brothers in arms, a potent combination of drivers that make possible the ultimate sacrifice.

But what if this bulwark is insufficient? What if the necessity of the thing cannot guard the warrior against the depravities he's forced to actualize? What if the action, the killing, gets into his blood and refuses to depart even when he's returned home to the stability of his old life? Mr. Pelecanos speculates in his spare but striking novel.

A veteran of the most recent Iraq War, Spero Lucas has Washington D.C. in his blood. The adopted son of hard-working Greeks, he was a head-strong boy of 19 when the September 11th Attacks changed the history of his nation. Feeling the pull of patriotism, he entered the marines and was shipped out to Iraq where he lost a sizeable chunk of both his innocence and his twenties. Home once more, he contents himself with freelance, investigative work for a high-profile attorney who isn't above defending the odd violent drug-dealer.

Missing the action and the camaraderie of the war, Lucas is receptive when one of the attorney's clients,currently in jail pending trial, approaches him with a deal. Someone has had the temerity to steal from the marijuana kingpin while he's incarcerated and that simply cannot be allowed to stand. If Lucas agrees to recover his stolen property, he can keep 40 percent as his cut for making right what fools put wrong. With memories of the war singing in his veins, Lucas agrees to the arrangement, plunging himself into the underbelly of a city that not so long ago was the murder capital of America. Remnants of these violent times linger on in the American capital, remnants that might well allow Spero to feel like he's once again a warrior.

Comprised of the fatalism of The Wire, the cool of Elmore Leonard and the mystery of the classic detective novel, The Cut is crime fiction at its most engaging. Spare unto skeletal, Mr. Pelecanos prose could well be criticized for a lack of affect and sentiment were such expressions and emotions not left to flow from the words and deeds of his small but vivid cast of characters, rather than from the author's own flowery pen. In this, he asks of his readers more than is obvious in the first few pages. For it is an easy thing for an author to euse prose to omnipotently fill in the gaps for his readers, to use the thoughts of his characters to spell out what cannot be said. In assiduously avoiding this convenience, this crutch, Mr. Pelecanos insists that his readers peel the literary onion, that they feel out the scenarios his characters get themselves into, that they understand the urges and the drives of a world they will likely never know.

But more than the work's structure has made The Cut a success. For Spero Lucas is a captivating presence. A young man possessed of vitality and drive, he is as urgent as he is hampered by inexperience, as eager as he is damaged by war. For while he has managed to re-engage with civilian life more or less successfully, re-awakening all the hungers of a vibrant, healthy male, he has been forever changed by the war which has imprinted upon him a dangerous desire for action that must be sated. For this thirst has become the cornerstone of Lucas' life, the guide by which he tracks through this half-forgotten world. To abandon it would be to abandon who he's become. And yet this need is a sire's song that will lead him down a dark and treacherous road.

This is both breezy and affecting, quiet and thunderous. It is easy to see why Mr. Pelecanos and The Wire formed such a devastating partnership. (4/5 Stars)

Arrows of The Night by Richard Bonin

From The Week of December 12, 2011

What forces shape a nation's policies? Is it the will of its people bound together in common cause and cultural background? Is it the nation's media whose coverage of national issues helps mold the conversation? Perhaps it's the politicians who seek to satisfy all constituencies as a means of holding onto their preeminent power and influence. Most often, it is likely that all three primary forces have their role to play in the shaping of events, each balancing the other in a delicate dance of interlocking orbits the gestalt of which prevents a nation from skewing too far off course. But once in a great while, the dance is ignored, bypassed by a single force strong enough, clever enough, and manipulative enough to overpower the wisdom, the credulity and the common sense of a nation's leaders, all of whom should know better. Napoleon managed it through cunning and popular opinion. Hitler managed it through anger and manufactured outrage. Will the 21st century remember Ahmed Chalabi alongside these men of influence? Arrows of The Night suggests it well might.

Mr. Bonin, a producer for 60 Minutes, chronicles here the difficult, dramatic and destructive life of Ahmed Chalabi. The scion of a wealthy Iraqi family forced into exile by Saddam Hussein's rise to power in the 1960s, Ahmed weathered the isolation of boarding school in Britain, received his doctorate in mathematics in America, earned his financial stripes as a banker in Jordan and established himself as a man of intelligence and refined tastes all without a land to call home. Even more remarkable, he ascended to international success without the benefits of wealth his family had once enjoyed when, prior to Hussein's rise, they were allies of Iraq's royal family. Ahmed an exile, a self-made man, a success with a burning passion that no amount of personal achievement could sate. He wanted Saddam Hussein destroyed.

Setting out on a 20-year mission, Ahmed Chalabi rallied dissident Iraqis, seduced Neoconservatives, recruited US congressmen, and positioned himself for CIA assistance all in the singleminded desire to consign Saddam Hussein to history and replace him with a CIA-lead Iraq helmed by Ahmed Chalabi. Though his odyssey would experience numerous, ruinous ups and downs -- there appears to have been no bridge he was not willing to burn in the actualization of his goal, a fact which nearly found him barred from the halls of power --, he was ultimately successful in convincing the government of the United States to go to war in Iraq in 2003 and finish, there, what they failed to do 12 years earlier, to topple a tyrant from his throne and replace him with Ahmed Chalabi and the tenuous hope of democracy in the most unstable part of the world. He didn't sit in on the national security meetings; he didn't give the orders; he didn't have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks without which a war in Iraq would have seemed foolish. Nonetheless, he was there to capitalize on every opportunity, to push every button, to charm every powerbroker and to twist every arm in the realization of a dream 40 years in coming.

Arrows of The Night is a brilliant biography of an exceptional man and the flawed character that ultimately destroyed him. Drawing on interviews with Chalabi, along with conversations with politicians, powerbrokers and intelligence officers who dealt with him, Mr. Bonin paints a masterful and convincing portrait of a man so driven by a singular desire to restore his family's honor and position in Iraqi society that he is consumed by it. Ahmed Chalabi forgot need's most important lesson, that the stronger we want something, the more we are willing to compromise ourselves, our beliefs, our morals, even our friendships, in order to seize it. As humans, We are not strong enough, much less sufficiently self-aware, to indulge our needs without making sacrifices which is why we do not journey alone, why we have friends and allies to travel with us and keep us in line. Ahmed Chalabi was subsumed by his desire and there was no one there to stop him.

But as much as this work is a success as a biography, it is also a useful and potent glimpse into the workings of government and how it too is compromised by its wants. From the Neocons who believed so powerfully in their dogmas that they were willing to squander American lives and treasure to prove their eeeeerighteousness to the politicians who bring about so much destruction for the want to do half-hearted good, the government of the United States, here, is revealed to be a gigantic web of influence pedaling wherein each player does his level best to advance his own agenda by trading favors and capitalizing on alliances. To whatever extent this grim tapestry of government is authentic, it is utterly disturbing in its complete absence of decency and reason. Policy must be shaped by facts, not by factions and their dogmas. Allow oneself to be guided by the latter and he will quickly find himself mired in a calamitous war from which there is no fiscal recovery.

As disturbing as it is riveting. An excellent read. (4/5 Stars)

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

From The Week of October 03, 2011

Though we have, and will continue to, debate the value and the importance of the various social, legal, and political pillars that underpin successful societies, we know this much. It is impossible to live a life of peace in a world of chaos. Just a glance the way of the war-torn regions of human civilization, where the rule of law has failed, where justice has ceased to flow from the state and its institutions, and where the government ignores the will of the people, demonstrates this truth. These are dark places in which corruption has so thoroughly eclipsed fairness and lawfulness that peaceful people can only survive by conforming, by obeying, by being drawn down into that darkness. In this world, there is no room left for morality, not for those who want to live another day, not for those who have families to protect, and certainly not for those who disagree with their regime. Though The Forever War is, in many respects, just another book about the war-torn, the extent to which it exposes this truth bestows upon it the power to prick even the most calloused of consciences.

In The tradition of true gonzo journalism, Mr. Filkins, who has reported from the Middle East for the L.A. Times, the New York Times and the New Yorker, recounts, here, his various journeys through Afghanistan and Iraq during the American occupation of both countries. From the young Afghan boys who race heedlessly across minefields to the tormented Iraqi fathers whose families are threatened and murdered on even the suspicion of working for the Americans, the reader is plunged headlong into a world that, thanks to the corrosive effects of corruption and religious fundamentalism, is defenseless against the atrocities of its demented criminals. Such conditions are antithetical to peaceful living, driving many who would have otherwise been productive and educated citizens into flight from their decaying countries.

The American government, trying to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq would undoubtedly attempt to argue that these are merely temporary conditions that will clear up when democracy is implemented and the trust of the people earned back, but Mr. Filkins, in both his description of the mistakes of the Bremer administration and the insular isolation of the Green Zone as a whole, leaves little doubt that it will be decades before life is normal in Iraq. And Iraq is perhaps the healthier of the two nations, with Afghanistan lacking even the shreds of a civil society around which a fair state might cohere. For while it may be true that the Western powers have pacified certain areas within these countries, they do not control the countryside from which insurgents bide their time until the inevitable,American withdrawal.

The Forever War is, emotionally, a difficult read. In his ride-alongs with the US military as they try to clear out insurgents, in his runs through dangerous and troubled Baghdad, and in his interactions with friendly and bellicose locals both in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Filkins has successfully painted a picture of a part of the world so fragmented, so fraught with paralytic corruption, so infected by insurgents, that it is hard to imagine it ever recovering. However, as much as his conclusions are cause for depression, the extent to which he distinguishes the human story from the regional one makes this a worthwhile read. Over and over again, we are presented with examples of people who want to live, who want to provide for their families, who want to be safe. But those lives are denied them by the destructive forces that plague their world. There are moments of cultural connection, moments of hope in which maybe there could exist mutual understanding, but how can that delicate union be nurtured while the insurgent bombs are falling, while the world is thunder and rage?

Written prior to the Sunni Awakening in 2007, The Forever War suffers from being somewhat dated. The severity of the violence has seemingly ebbed from its nihilistic heights during Mr.Filkins' time in both countries. Nonetheless, this remains an excellent read. Its battles thrill, its conditions appall, its exposes amaze and its introspections devastate. Most importantly, however, it is another brick in the wall of our understanding of the folly of war. Justice cannot be brought with bombs and guns.Democracy cannot be instituted with smart bombs and tanks. It has to be cultivated. It has to be grown. Freedom is not AstroTurf. It cannot be manufactured. when it is, this is the result. (4/5 Stars)

War Talk by Arundhati Roy

From The Week of September 12, 2011

Institutions are inherently corrupt. They operate by funneling power away from their many members and into the clutches of their few leaders. And we know from painful experience that whenever power of any significance is collected in the hands of a few, the sins of greed and arrogance and self-righteousness are soon to follow. With this in mind, how are governments not institutions writ large? Yes, they are veneered in respectability thanks to their elective natures, but the moment their elections conclude, they become autocratic institutions, their power limited only by the desire to maintain it. This, at least, is Ms. Roy's view and in this she is quite convincing.

From the Palestinian problem to the Iraq War, from the arrogance of leaders past to the bias of today's cable news, War Talk is a series of essays which coalesce around the events of September 11, 2001, and the extent to which this attack welcomed the United States into a difficult and dangerous world largely of its own creation. After all, Ms. Roy argues, America has worked its ostensibly benevolent will upon the world's various international conflicts for going on 60 years now. And rather than creating a world of peaceful, free commerce -- America's stated aims --, it has wrought bloodshed and misery: toppling governments, supporting despots, proliferating nuclear weapons and binding subservient nations to exploitative contracts that best serve its corporate backers. But though all this is rather obvious to the rest of the world, it is not obvious to the American people who, when they open a newspaper or turn on the news, are not greeted with the sins of their government; they are presented with the noble sacrifices of their soldiers trying to build schools in countries they've just bombed back to the stone age. Freedom, Ms. Roy points out, cannot be brought about by violence.

If Ms. Roy is right to argue that institutions are corrupt and that corrupt institutions and the principles they are founded upon are bound to fail, then what will replace them? Ms. Roy seems less than certain. She favors the power of the people in whom she clearly invests her hopes. Perhaps if we all had to live together, neighbor with neighbor, community with community, face to face with those we purport to hate and beholden to no master, then we would not war. We would find alternative solutions to the problems that plague us. We are aware of the sins of free market capitalism. We are aware of the sins of the hierarchical power structures upon which institutions and governments are based. To continue to pursue them knowing the damage they cause would be nothing short of folly.

Unfortunately, this, to me, is naive. Replacing corrupt institutions with people power is a lovely idea, but how? Direct democracy offers some hope, but as much as direct democracy endows the people with the full measure of national power, how the people vote is still subject to the same biases and prejudices Ms. Roy blames the media for perpetuating. So not only do we require the people to change their political systems, we need them to demand a vast reform of the modern media as well? This seems hopelessly far-fetched.

Ms. Roy is an impassioned essayist. Her advocacy for the downtrodden is as inspiring as her rage at the cruelty of our rulers is invigorating. But while her heart is in the right place, any hope for positive change seems a long way off. We will need multiple revolutions to see a world Ms. Roy can admire. And right now, we all care too much for the things we stand to lose to take a chance on a better future. (3/5 Stars)

Imperial Life In The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

From The Week of March 21, 2010

We can and will, as a society, debate the merits and the mistakes of the 2003 Iraq War. We'll attack it on grounds ideological, political and even practical, but we'll never come to a full understanding of it. There are some events in the world that are too complex and too secretive for us to individually digest. We will simply never have enough information to comprehend their truth. So what do we do? How do we come to grips with matters as important as these?

We can examine what life is like, on the ground, for the Iraqi people. Mr. Chandrasekaran endeavors to do just that by first exploring the Green Zone, the lavish, American, secured compound deep inside Baghdad, and then expanding his travels out into Baghdad proper, where the streets are dangerous, the rule of law dubious and the shattered lives as plentiful as sand in the dessert. Mr. Chandrasekaran chronicles a few of these beaten down Iraqis, descendants of a proud people now bowed under years of dictatorship and war. He follows their attempts to build new lives out of the rubble of their country while suicide bombs and American policies pound down around them.

Interwoven into these real world experiences is a history of the civilian occupation of Iraq. Mr. Chandrasekaran narrows his focus down to the vital decisions, under Paul Bremmer, that shaped the years to come, siting in particular the calamitous decision to disband the Iraq Army and send countless thousands of armed young men into the streets without any prospect for employment. A clusterfuck of the gravest order, a decision which surely defined the state of Iraqi life until 2007 when the troop surge and the Sunni Awakening began to knit some semblance of Iraqi life back together again.

Though Mr. Chandrasekaran is unsparingly critical of Mr. Bremmer and of the flawed decision making exhibited by his civil administration, he also communicates that, in many ways, there's simply no good way to go about nation-building a conquered country. A mixture of wounded pride and cultural miscommunication will inevitably doom all such efforts. A more nuanced approach is called for, not only to avoid the death and destruction that result from flawed policy, but to avoid the astronomical amounts of cash that have to be sunk into rebuilding a nation with any sort of success. Meanwhile, as Mr. Chandrasekaran so vividly portrays, Baghdad is divided between the slice of Americana that exists in the Green Zone and the lawless and war-torn world that suffers beyond its air-conditioned walls. (3/5 Stars)

We Were One by Patrick K. O'Donnell

From The Week of January 17, 2010

We know from those who have engaged in man's darkest and most enduring pursuit that war is a hellish thing. It has inspired us to achieve feats of technology and unity undreamed of in times less desperate, all while requiring us to pay a grievous cost, in the form of the stains on our souls and in the form of the innumerable lives that have been snatched away by its brutality. Thanks to a free press and to modern technologies, some of which were inspired by war, the talk of war is now steered by a war's justness, not its glory. Citizens can properly assess the cost of conflict, to grasp whether or not their leaders are lying to them about its righteousness. Which is what makes reflecting upon the 2003 Iraq War so achingly painful. We knew its price. We knew it was launched on shaky intelligence. We knew it was bankrupt. And yet we went on, largely because we had no choice, because a handful of men now decide the fates of millions.

These are points worth making. Perhaps Mr. O'Donnell has even made them in some of his other works. However, We Were One is not a macro view of war and its weight. It's a personal tale of one unit in Iraq, in that ugly war. It is about a unit of men who took a town, Fallujah, invested with insurgents and made it safe. They did not achieve this goal through overwhelming force of numbers, of weapons, or of air support. In fact, they had no technological advantage over the enemy at all. They were hard men who took a hard town because they owed it to their fallen friends.

We Were One is a story about brotherhood and bravery. There are no Rumsfelds here, no Bushes. There is just courage in the face of overwhelming fire. We can debate the virtuousness of war all we like, but when they happen we must not look away from those who fight them. For we will miss something precious indeed, the lengths to which human beings will go to save their friends and comrades when their lives are on the line.

Moving and tragic. I could have wished for a bit more criticism on the war from Mr. O'Donnell, but that wasn't his objective here. We Were One is about soldiers, not wars. And to that end, it is a tale told very well. (4/5 Stars)

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

From The Week of October 04, 2009

As funny as it is bizarre, Generation Kill is
Evan Wright's experiences as an imbedded journalist with the US Marines during the
2003 Iraq War. Though the war splatters this tale with all its customary ugliness, Mr. Wright's account concerns the personalities of the marines more than it does the circumstances of the war they are fighting. Just what kind of warrior is forged by the US military? Is he a terrifying thing, a hound trained to kill? In this generation of video games and surrealistic movies, does he take upon himself the damage of killing? How does he cope with the idea of a war being fought for all the wrong reasons? The answers that come back to Mr. Wright are sometimes stone-cold sobering. Other times, they are laugh-out-loud hilarious, showing again that humor is often the most effective shield against the ever-present grimness of war. Meet the new American warrior. Shake his hand, look into his eyes. What do you see? (4/5 Stars)

Hubris by Michael Isikoff And David Corn

From The Week of August 09, 2009

I was peripherally aware of the now infamous Sixteen Words in George W. Bush's 2003 State of The Union address and the role that Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, played in the scandal created by those sixteen words, but it wasn't until I read Hubris, by Isikoff (Newsweek) and Corn (The Nation), that I understood the extent to which the diseased mentality of the Bush Administration drove the White House's vengeful exposing of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent. Though Hubris only tells one side of this difficult and complex story, Isikoff and Corn, together, paint a convincing portrait of a White House set on war in Iraq and how earnestness to avenge 9-11 lead to abuses, not only of the Constitution in the form of the Patriot Act, but of the dubious intelligence used to convince Congress to fund conflict in Iraq in 2003.

Even if readers ideologically disagree with the case put forth in Hubris, they must agree that the work makes two powerful arguments about human nature and its affect on politics and power. Firstly, the more powerful governments are, the more willing they are to use their power to destroy people who disagree with them. This is exemplified by the case of Plame whose career was sabotaged after her husband, a former US ambassador criticized the White House in a New York Times Op Ed. And secondly, the desires of presidents and their administrations are perfectly obvious to the agencies that support them. If a president wants a reason to go to war, those agencies will find a reason, if not by committing fraud then certainly by distorting the findings of science and intelligence to fit the needs of their bosses. This yes men culture is a pernicious force, especially when it is married to an administration willing to go to war over unfinished business. (4/5 Stars)