No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle For Fallujah
Bing West. New York: Bantam, 2005. 448 pp. Order of Battle. Notes. Bib. Maps. $25.00
Reviewed by Captain Tyson F. Belanger, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve
Author and former Marine Bing West weaves a thrilling and informative tale of U.S. operations in Fallujah and Ramadi, Iraq, between April 2003 and April 2005, with particular emphasis to the coalition offensive against Fallujah in April 2004. No True Glory stands as a worthwhile history and a proud tribute to American military personnel.
West specializes in up-close accounts of combat actions and policy deliberations. He openly sympathizes with young servicemen, wanting readers to appreciate their warrior ethos and selflessness. He demands much more, however, from leaders, especially at the most senior policy levels. In many ways, No True Glory resembles Black Hawk Down spread over a longer period.
The book is structured around four U.S. strategies toward Fallujah. The first opens with Fallujah's cold welcome for U.S. Army units in April 2003. The Baathists hide, but their power survives and local governance fails miserably. Under-manned, with limited resources, the Army withdraws from the city and pursues a strategy of raids and incentives. As the situation deteriorates further, the Army turns control over to Marine forces in March 2004. The Marines plan to invest more in Iraqi Security Forces.
The second opens with the killing and public mutilation of four American contractors by Fallujah's insurgents in March 2004. West paints the event's significance. To "go in" means to abandon the Marine's patient strategy. To "stay out" signals weakness. High U.S. officials order an attack. As a political backlash develops across Iraq, however, the same officials order a withdrawal. Reluctantly, the frustrated Marines withdraw from the city and empower the Fallujah Brigade. The insurgents claim victory.
The withdrawal in April 2004 sets the stage for the third phase. The Fallujah Brigade fails to uphold its agreements. Insurgents kidnap, torture, and intimidate Iraqi National Guardsmen and Jihadists seize control and export violence throughout Iraq. In response, Marines busily prepare for an inevitable post-U.S. presidential election showdown.
The final phase kicks off in November 2004 when coalition forces launch a new assault. The battle becomes a nasty houseto-house fight for a city that most civilians had already abandoned. This time, the high officials let the war dogs off the leash. The coalition devastates insurgent forces and secures the city. No True Glory ends by noting the high cost of this final operation and the coalition's continuing slow progress throughout Iraq.
West's research is reasonably thorough. No True Glory is based on hundreds of interviews from six extended trips to Iraq. He took significant risks and invested considerable time to understand a very complex puzzle.
Veterans find several omissions and mischaracterizations in No True Glory. Personalities, dialogues, and incidents do not always sound exactly right. Several units and neighboring towns go unmentioned. An advance copy of the book calls November 2004's Operation Al Fajr by its old name, Operation Phantom Fury, and only vaguely describes the direction of Fallujah after Al Fajr. The discrepancies and omissions become dangerous because, as years go by, this book may distort our collective memories of very important events. Still, these weaknesses remain small compared to the significance of the total work. Veterans should welcome No True Glory as a starting point for recounting their own stories.
At its best, No True Glory puts the reader in command, on patrol, and in the assault. The reader must answer, "What would I do?" It thereby serves as essential reading for anyone soon to deploy. It orients readers to operations in Iraq better than any manual could and encourages a historically grounded thought process to overcome the continuity problems of unit turnovers.
Finally, No True Glory reminds us of fallen heroes. The author is absolutely correct about the nature of glory: Many warriors do not get their due unless someone records their deeds. West does his part to correct this. No True Glory gives true glory to real heroes: American servicemen and women, the volunteer professionals selflessly serving our nation in a time of war.
Captain Belanger served as an infantry platoon commander in 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom I. He then served as an Iraqi Security Force liaison officer during Operation Iraqi Freedom II and Operation Al Fajr.
At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention
David Rieff. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. 288 pp. $24.00.
Reviewed by Michael S. Neiberg
The new world order ushered in by the end of the Cold War brought both U.S. military supremacy and a series of humanitarian crises from Bosnia to Rwanda to the plight of the Iraqi Kurds, to name just a few. U.S. citizens of all political persuasions began to advocate the use of the former in order to solve the latter. For the left, the military power of the United States held out the possibility of stopping or even preventing genocides and other large-scale, man-made humanitarian disasters. The right has more commonly focused on the ability to use force to cajole (of if necessary, remove) dictators and threats to regional peace. Despite differences over the favored place for its use, the lure of military power and its potential to make the world a better place, however defined, is bipartisan.
David Rieff once shared the belief that U.S. military power could make the world a better place and protect those who could not protect themselves. His journalistic experiences in covering the United Nations convinced him that it was unable to do the job. The UN's great failing, he contends, is that it is responsible to the world's states, not the world's people. As a result, it must act from the principle that state sovereignty is paramount; thus, the UN must intervene in humanitarian crises with kid gloves, respecting even the sovereignty of the rogue regimes it is charged with policing. Neither was Rieff confident in the ability or the will of the European Union, Russia, or China to commit resources to humanitarian aid. Consequently, he became a firm advocate of the use of U.S. military power for humanitarian ends worldwide. This collection of his essays follows his disillusion with once deeply held ideals. The result is a troubling book that sees plenty of crises and very few solutions.
The essays in this book reflect Rieff's reporting of conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa, the Balkans, and Iraq. His experiences in these places did little to convince him that humanitarian intervention can stop genocide or improve the lives of the victims of brutal dictatorships. The ease with which victims in Africa and the Balkans used U.S. and European military protection to become victimizers themselves particularly struck Rieff. Moreover, neither the central presumptions of the left nor the right held up in the crucible of these operations. Slow to act and slower still to grasp the complexities of situations such as Rwanda and Kosovo, the western powers stumbled in without appropriate plans, or even a clear sense of what they were trying to accomplish. The predictable-if oddly unforeseen-result was not resolution but further muddling. Altruism, he notes, often slipped seamlessly into barbarism.
Iraq struck Rieff as the ultimate expression of interventionism gone awry. He is justifiably skeptical about how deeply the past three presidential administrations have been committed to humanitarian problems in Iraq. Still, humanitarianism has been central to the justifications of U.S. policy toward that country since 1990. Rieff reserves some of his harshest criticisms for the sanctions and oil for food programs, which he argues actually propped up Saddam Hussein's regime while at the same time causing tremendous suffering for ordinary Iraqis. The 2003 invasion has done little to right that wrong, leaving the Iraqis to whom Rieff spoke deeply suspicious about U.S. motives. The decision to protect the Iraqi oil Ministry from looting, but not the museums and hospitals, only underscored that suspicion. More fundamentally, Rieff sees the failure of U.S. planners to take post-war issues as seriously as they should have as a mark of the problems of intervention.
Rieff deserves credit for plainly showing his disillusion with a set of beliefs he once held dear. Few writers are as candid in self-criticism. He also offers stinging critiques of far-left critics of U.S. power as well as neo-conservative hyper-advocates of intervention. As a criticism of a still widely held American tenet, this book deserves to be read by a wide audience. Still, Rieff presents no answers to the essential dilemma. To use U.S. power is to risk all of the unintended outcomes of military intervention that he outlines in his book. But to turn the nation's back on crises in places like Darfur or Afghanistan under the Taliban is to sidestep a great power's moral obligations as well as to place its own security at risk.
Dr. Neiberg, author of Making Citizen-Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service, is professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and co-director of the school's Center for the Study of War and Society.
Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind
Nancy Sherman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 242 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $26.00.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Alexander Korn, U.S. Navy
Modern U.S. military culture emphasizes stoicism, but how much of our ethics are truly in line with classical Stoic thinking? In Stoic Warriors, Professor Nancy Sherman, the Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy from 1997 to 1999, provides an excellent summary of the classic Stoic thinkers, including Cicero, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Professor Sherman makes their teachings more accessible to a nonacademic audience by using examples to which both military and civilian readers can relate.
Professor Sherman starts her book with Admiral James Stockdale's seven-year ordeal as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Stockdale's experience, and his thinking during it, provides an effective introduction to Stoicism. Her second chapter discusses the military's attitude towards physical fitness, and how Stoicism can help deal with loss of a limb or other serious injuries. Next, she explores the decorum taught to military recruits but questions whether external indicators like good manners truly reflect internal values and morals. A chapter on anger-and how feigned anger is a far more useful leadership tool than genuine anger-will have most readers nodding in agreement, remembering personal examples. Two subsequent chapters delve into the psychological aspects of combat, fear, the reluctance to kill, and dealing with fallen comrades. Finally, the author attempts to reconcile the military ideals of self-reliance and teamwork, showing how seemingly contradictory values can in fact complement each other.
Military professionals can gain some practical knowledge of Stoicism as well as an academic introduction to the philosophy from Stoic Warriors. While a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton, then-Commander Stockdale focused on the things he could control: his own dignity, and resisting his captors when possible. Physical discomfort, including his crippled left leg, was beyond his control, so he ignored it to the best of his ability. Ignoring what we cannot control, and only worrying about things that are in our power to affect, extends beyond the extreme of being a POW into daily events. The author provides the example of a sailor scheduled to get married after returning from deployment. When his deployment is extended, the only thing he can still control is his attitude. He is liberated when he refuses to let events he cannot change dictate his mental happiness. All service members have limits to their authority; the Stoics teach us to focus on what we can change, and to find satisfaction in those successes we can achieve.
While offering valuable insights into the philosophy, the author is less astute when it comes to the ethics of the modern U.S. military. She believes that fear of higher authorities and mindless drill are the basis for much military conduct. Even at the Naval Academy, the training command where she taught, leadership by fear is discouraged in place of higher forms of motivation, such as teamwork, pride, and peer pressure. Consequently, her concerns about whether military manners are internalized are off the mark. Naval officers are ethical not because they were forced to be polite while midshipmen, rather because they were given an ideal to strive for and truly believe in those virtues.
Stoic Warriors is an excellent primer for Stoic philosophy, boiling down the great philosophers into 180 easy-to-read pages. Anybody wishing to learn about Stoicism should read this book. The Stoic emphasis on focusing only on what we can control is a valuable lesson for all of us, military and civilian alike. However, civilians looking for an insight into the military mind should continue looking, as this book lacks a true understanding of the mindset of our brave servicemen and women.
Lieutenant Korn, a surface warfare officer, is studying National Security Affairs at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California. A 1999 Naval Academy graduate, his last sea tour was as officer in command of a MK V Special Operations Craft detachment during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
One Christmas in Washington: Roosevelt and Churchill Forge the Grand Alliance
David Bercuson & Holger Herwig. Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 2005. 320 pp. $35.00.b
Reviewed by Robert S. Bolia
It can be a little disconcerting to pick up a book written by two authors. There is the concern, for example, that their styles will not merge well with seams detectable in the writing, clearly delineating sections as the product of one author. Delightfully, that is not the case with this book, an account of the ARCADIA conference between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt and their military staffs in the winter of 1941-42, which exhibits a unity of style atypical of multi-author collaborations. Perhaps this is because the authors-both well-respected historians-have collaborated on Deadly Seas: The Story of the St. Croix, U305 and the Battle of the Atlantic and, more recently, on The Destruction of the Bismarck. In the end, all that matters is the result, which is that One Christmas in Washington is a pleasure to read.
The book opens at the Argentia meeting in Newfoundland in the summer of 1941, the result of which was the Atlantic Charter. This serves as a prelude to chapter-length biographies of Roosevelt and Churchill, which take us up to the event that provoked the Christmas meeting: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. entry into the war. The remainder of the work is devoted to a day-by-day description of the ARCADIA conference from the perspectives of all of the major participants.
It is these perspectives that should be one of the work's major selling points. For while the authors do not dwell on biographical details-except in the case of the president and the prime minister-they do provide enough background information on each of the major participants to provide us with an idea of their prejudices and personalities, an understanding of which is necessary to appreciate the experience of the meeting as well as the outcome. Many of the British attendees, for example, did not suppose that the Americans knew enough about war to contribute anything more than troops and materiel, while some of the Americans felt confident that there was nothing their new allies could teach them about fighting. In the end, it was personalities that won out over prejudices.
The authors' narrative of the conference's evolution reads almost like a suspense novel. In one scene we have Churchill or Harry Hopkins holding sway over Roosevelt, in another Churchill being dominated by Eleanor Roosevelt. But it was George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army, who was able to control the meeting by the force of his personality, admitting compromise where possible but refusing to budge on issues he regarded as critical, especially the question of unity of command.
This is a serious story, but not one without humor. Indeed, the book is replete with amusing anecdotes, not the least of which has Churchill, surrounded by empty Scotch bottles, telling a member of the White House staff, "I hope you will come to my defense someday if someone should claim that I am a teetotaler."
One Christmas in Washington is a highly readable account of an important if largely unknown historical event, and would be worthwhile if it was nothing more. In fact, however, it is much more. In the vividness of its portrayal it brings history to life, providing an enhanced appreciation of its link to the present. Moreover, in an age in which all of America's wars are fought by joint and coalition forces, it offers a glimpse into the important components of coalition building, namely understanding and compromise. For this reason, if for no other, the book may prove not only timely, but also timeless.
Robert S. Boila is a scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate. He has an MA in Military Studies from American Military University.