Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq
Kirsten Holmstedt. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007. 384 pp. Illus. Index. $27.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Roberta L. Shea, U.S. Marine Corps
Following 9/11 Kirsten Holmstedt began gathering clippings from newspapers and stories from the Internet about women serving in combat zones. Her curiosity ultimately unsatisfied, she began to interview and correspond with service women. Six years in the making, the extended time spent on this book added significantly to its value; her pursuit brought her to many whose stories changed over time—reshaped in their own memory as months passed, reformed by new ways of managing their feelings as they healed in hospitals or returned home, and supplemented by additional deployments.
Band of Sisters is shaped by the author's perspective as a civilian new to military writing. Untrained in the art or science of war, she is no Tom Clancy, so a reader cannot expect to learn the intricacies of military operations or fine points of tactics. This is not a book attempting a historical documentation of each encounter with the enemy. It is a compilation of recollections by Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen as they saw and remember it. As a result, Holmstedt concentrates on their impressions, perspectives, and memories of what they viewed as important at the moment.
The author is intensely curious but somewhat lacking in tact, akin to a pestering relative who asks all the questions at a deployment homecoming the rest of your family was told by the unit chaplain not to ask right away—questions such as: What were you thinking when you were shot at? What were you feeling at the time? Were you afraid of letting your unit down? and How do you feel about it now? Luckily for her readers, the answers are revealed without getting sappy.
Nevertheless, when the author tries to extend beyond the immediate experiences of her subjects, she sometimes wanders into less than accurate descriptions. For example, when she relays the story of Marine Lance Corporal Chrissy DeCaprio's tour of duty with a military police unit escorting convoys in Iraq, Holmstedt is powerful in her descriptions of DeCaprio's work as a turret gunner. But she adds unnecessary and inaccurate explanations by stating, "The troops did not refer to the detainees as ?prisoners' because technically, the United States was not at war. They would be called prisoners only if the U.S. was at war." For the most part, however, Holmstedt is disciplined and does not stray too far from her expertise—retelling the gripping and unique personal stories of the warfighters.
Many other books and articles neatly sum up the role of women in the current war as operating with "no front lines." To those who want to go beyond this all-too-brief summation and move into an understanding of what policy means in practice, I recommend this book. Not limited to a story of gender, in fact, Holmstedt's book provides great insight into what it means for those in combat support or combat service support to operate in this counterinsurgency; the title of this book could have easily been Without Front Lines had it added just a few stories of male truck drivers, public affairs officers, and military police. But in short, combat veteran Major Tammy Duckworth has it right when she says in the book's foreword, "The ultimate message of this book is that the stories are not about being women. They are about being tough and professional."
Lieutenant Colonel Shea is the director of the Commandant's Staff Group in Headquarters Marine Corps and has deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq with the 22d Marine Expeditionary Unit. She is a member of the U.S. Naval Institute Editorial Board.
Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
Elizabeth D. Samet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 259 pp. $23.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brendan Greeley Jr., U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
"When I ask you at the end of the hour whether you can hear the difference between iambic and trochaic meter, "Hooah, ma'am!' just isn't going to cut it."
Thus Professor Elizabeth Samet conducts an academic preemptive strike on her English lit class at the U.S. Military Academy. For the uninitiated, Samet defines "Hooah!' as "an affirmative expression of the warrior spirit." Think of Al Pacino as Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman.
A Yale Ph.D. who arrived at West Point in 1997, Samet has spent the last decade teaching literature as one of the civilian instructors who now constitute 20 percent of the faculty. She likes the cadets and her colleagues. She also likes General Ulysses Simpson Grant, whose memoirs have become for her a touchstone. She applauds the general officers responsible for the West Point syllabus who favor a liberal education. She remains unconvinced of the reasons given for going to war in Iraq, accepts Amnesty International's characterization of Guantanamo Bay as a gulag, and is disgusted by what happened at Abu Ghraib. She worries about the potential influence of the Officers' Christian Fellowship; in a chapter titled "Bibles, Lots of Bibles," she figures that there are more atheists in foxholes than at West Point.
The title of her brief memoir—Soldier's Heart—comes from the World War I term for the condition now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is apt (although the cover could have featured a more recognizable cadet uniform) because Samet writes at length of the internal conflicts that spill out daily in class as cadets wrestle with the ambiguities inherent in the war on terrorism they are soon to face. The tug-of-war between the philosophers of Athens and the warriors of Sparta is very real to her. She seems much more involved with cadets than were the instructors I knew (virtually all of whom were military); some confide in her: "You're the closest thing to a mother they have around here, scary as that sounds," a colleague told her. She teaches electives but also core courses, so she meets cadets ranging from jocks to budding authors. She gives names to her favorites . . . the Three Musketeers, the Melancholy Poets.
Samet enjoys her classes, although she initially dreaded an "after lunch day-care session [of] rambunctious plebes [freshmen] many of whom were athletes." Eventually, she sorted things out: "They became more disciplined thinkers and writers, while I became more adroit at praising linemen for a sensitive reading of Emily Dickinson or a nuanced insight into Antony and Cleopatra." She teaches Randall Jarrell's The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner to bring home the reality of war and relies on "fast-talking dames" like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday to show women giving as good as they get.
In a chapter titled "Becoming Penelope, the only Woman in the Room," she recounts the difficulties female cadets face. The atmosphere is apparently more relaxed today, although a recent graduate wrote Samet that her years at the academy were marked by "both the darkest and brightest days of my life . . . agony and triumph always in the same breath."
On the afternoon of 9/11, she screened The Maltese Falcon. Afterward, neither she nor the cadets "attached any special significance to Sam Spade's ruminations on the inefficacy of torture or to his attempt to explain . . . his professional code of honor." Who knew? Four years later she was studying MacBeth with the Melancholy Poets, a section (class) taking a poetry elective, and things had changed. The cadets read an essay on playing the title role by actor Derek Jacobi, who singled out MacBeth's dual nature as the key to the character: "He is a highly intelligent, imaginative, articulate man, quite unlike the brutal non-thinking slasher of the battlefield, the tried, and honed, killing machine." Said one intelligent, imaginative, articulate cadet: "I don't consider myself a 'non-thinking slasher,' and I don't think Iraq is going to turn me into one." An officer who had fought in Vietnam suggested to her recently that it might do exactly that to some of them.
Fearing some of her cadets might turn into war criminals, for a time she "stopped teaching and started preaching" about the treatment of non-combatants in Iraq, Vietnam (My Lai), etc., in what she admits was an overreaction that she regrets.
With self-deprecating good humor, Samet gives us a scholar's view of what it's like to teach young Americans headed for combat. I wish she had been there when I was a cadet.
Hooah, ma'am.
Lieutenant Colonel Greeley, a naval aviator, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1961.
Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War: The Last Maoist War
Edward C. O'Dowd. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 234 pp. Maps. Appens. Notes. Bib. Index. $135.
Reviewed by Sameer Suryakant Patil
In 1979, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China launched a military campaign against Vietnam with an objective of forcing it to withdraw from Cambodia. This campaign was the culmination of a series of differences that had marked the Sino-Vietnamese relationship over the years. Current scholarship claims that the border war between the two countries was more closely related to the Sino-Soviet competition than it was to the events in Indochina. Edward O'Dowd provides an alternative argument about what he terms the "Third Indochina War." The author, the Major General Matthew C. Horner Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia, argues that the Chinese attack on Vietnam was part of a wider war in Indochina where earlier France and the United States had tasted defeat.
This involvement of three external powers in the region has defined the shape of contemporary Southeast Asia. The point O'Dowd wants to make, however, is even larger. According to him, the Chinese strategy was a failure despite the PLA being backed with all the elements of Chinese national power. The key reason for this failure, his study shows, was the Maoist ideology that permeated the PLA.
After setting out the preliminary argument, O'Dowd goes about demonstrating how the policy of Chinese leader Mao Zedong influenced the operational and strategic planning of the PLA. To O'Dowd, in the eyes of the Chinese leadership the army was first and foremost a political institution that lent it an effectiveness unmatched by other armies in the region. In contrast to those, only the PLA had a political work system that also provided a troop motivational program to enhance military effectiveness. The PLA was the first among equals of Maoist institutions. This emphasis on "politics in command" took its toll on professionalism, military training, and experience. The army had not seen action against a foreign enemy since the war with India in 1962. Hence, it entered the 1979 military campaign with archaic tactics. The Vietnamese army also was a political animal, but what distinguished it was its warfighting experience against some of the most formidable armies in the world.
The author presents an extremely detailed narrative of the war. With the aid of maps, he brings alive the Battle of Lang Son of February-March 1979. Realizing the inadequacies of their force, the PLA commanders resorted to attempts at winning the political support of the Vietnamese civilians in the theater of operations. But they failed against their highly motivated enemy. Both countries indulged in unconventional warfare that spread the war far from the Sino-Vietnamese border and laid the basis for an extended conflict, well into the next decade.
From 1979 to 1987, the Chinese repeatedly conducted large-scale operations against Vietnam, yet the Vietnamese army did not yield an inch. The Chinese nonetheless continued their artillery diplomacy. These actions on the part of Beijing were little more than symbolic. Concluding his argument O'Dowd says that the Third Indochina War was the "Last Maoist War" because it brought to end an era in which Maoism had shaped China's society and army.
Largely, O'Dowd's book is well written. Drawing information primarily from PLA documents, he makes a very convincing argument, which shows that much effort has been spent in analyzing the Chinese-language sources. This makes it a must read for military historians and practitioners interested in the Chinese military. Yet O'Dowd misses the point of what kind of lessons the present-day PLA learned from the mistakes of 1979. This lacuna notwithstanding, the book brings to the fore an aspect of China largely ignored by western historians.
Mr. Patil is pursuing a Ph.D. at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His specialty is the dynamics of great power competition in Asia, particularly China.
The Ultimate Battle: Okinawa 1945—The Last Epic Struggle of World War II
Bill Sloan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. 416 pp. Notes. Bib. Index. $27.
Reviewed by Commander John T. Kuehn, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Bill Sloan's book arrives at a timely moment. New debates and even controversies over the meaning of Operation Iceberg, the cataclysmic battle for Okinawa at the end of World War II, have flared up in recent years. As operations go, the effort was a miracle of naval power projection. However, as the campaign ground on it came to be regarded as a harbinger of what might come to pass if the United States invaded Japan.
During the course of the two-month campaign 21 warships were lost, 66 seriously damaged, and more than 10,000 Sailors killed and wounded, mostly because of a vicious and well-orchestrated kamikaze campaign—the highest U.S. naval losses of the Pacific War.
Ashore the butcher's bill was worse, and a reflection of the horrors of total war. In addition to the annihilation of the more than 100,000-man Japanese garrison, at least 80,000 civilians were killed. (Sloan estimates as many as 140,000 civilians died.) American casualties ashore numbered almost 70,000 killed, wounded, missing, and lost to combat fatigue. By the end of the campaign the enormous cost had caused a near panic in Washington, as the specter of all-out war on the Japanese homeland became apparent.
Sloan brings this gritty holocaust to life in all of its gory and tragic detail. He uses an eyewitness style that gives the reader personal accounts from all the perspectives of the fighting Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines. Each vignette is designed to capture an element of the combat environment or phase of the campaign. The author also does a fine job of providing the essential strategic and operational context for the Okinawa campaign. He takes particular care to show how the Japanese command team, especially the brilliant operations officer Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, settled on its strategic approach—one that guaranteed high U.S. casualties.
Instead of achieving decisive victory at the tactical level by repelling or annihilating the American landing forces, Yahara focused instead on achieving decision by inflicting maximum casualties using an elaborate fortified defense-in-depth that was mostly underground. Banzai charges were to be avoided at all cost. High American casualties and the promise of exponentially more against the main Japanese islands might crack the Americans' will and bring them to the table for a negotiated settlement. Peleliu and Iwo Jima were merely previews of Okinawa, just as Okinawa was a preview for the projected invasion of the main islands.
This deliberate strategy proved grimly efficient when yoked to the troops' fanatical devotion to the Emperor and combined with the suicide tactics of Admiral Matome Ugaki's kamikaze pilots. One weakness in Sloan's account is his failure to highlight and include the extraordinary Navy material and personnel losses at the hands of the kamikazes in his sobering summaries at the book's beginning and end. This is inexplicable since he spends a considerable part of the book—more than two chapters—in detailing the kamikaze campaign from its inception in 1944 to its effective conclusion at Okinawa (there were still some kamikaze attacks after Okinawa). Sloan avoids the common mistake of downplaying the horrific casualties to castigate the decision to drop the atomic bomb. If Okinawa has a justification, he argues, it gave shocked U.S. national leaders a graphic idea of losses to be expected in an invasion of mainland Japan. Simply, it made the decision to drop the atomic bombs all the easier.
Sloan writes that "Okinawa may one day be recalled as the last great human struggle of its size and scope ever waged on Planet Earth." Unfortunately, events in Korea, Vietnam, and later in Cambodia and Rwanda suggest that mass human bloodletting does not need industrial warfare or high levels of technology to find expression in human conflict. Despite this sort of wishful thinking it takes nothing away from the power of Sloan's narrative, and I highly recommend this book to a broad reading audience. We forget the realities of an apocalypse like Okinawa—its costs and its results—at our peril.