The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL
Eric Greitens. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 320 pp. Pref. Illus. Notes. $27.
Reviewed by Captain John Burnham, U.S. Navy
The Heart and the Fist is a serious book, but it is neither an autobiography nor a definitive account of the past decade of special operations. It is, rather, a story of personal development as seen through two seemingly divergent but (in the hands of author and former SEAL Eric Greitens) related lenses—the harsh military environment of naval special warfare and the inspiring but often gut-wrenching world of assistance to those in need. He wisely and ably keeps his focus on these two categories, weaving in the relevant history and philosophical references along the way.
The book opens and closes with vignettes from Greitens’ deployment to Iraq in 2006 and 2007. In between, it is divided into sections that emphasize the periods of his journey: his education at Duke University and the University of Oxford, his SEAL training, and his subsequent deployments to the Middle East and the Pacific (indeed, we worked together when I was a task force commander in Iraq and he was the Fallujah fusion cell director).
While at Duke, Greitens’ desire to test himself brought him to a boxing gym south of Durham, North Carolina; he learned to box because he wanted to “toughen up.” His trainer, Earl Blair, became just as important a teacher for him as his professors.
He received his “humanitarian education” during student trips in the 1990s to China, Bosnia, Rwanda, Bolivia, the Gaza Strip, India, and Cambodia. He was an observer, a young man experiencing for a few weeks what others have dedicated their lives to: teaching children, providing medical care, and trying to improve societies. He continually sought out these trips and acquired perspective beyond his years as a result—after his time in Rwanda in 1995, for example, he notes that “. . . what matters for the long term health and vitality of a people who have suffered is not what they are given, but what they do.” While this is not an original concept, in his book it crystallizes as the theme around which Greitens resolves to live his life.
With the attention SEALs are garnering these days, it is refreshing to read a grounded perspective concerning why someone would try out for the SEAL teams and endure the grueling training prior to being awarded the Trident. Greitens’ passages on the challenges he faced and the lessons he learned are the best I have come across—devoid of hyperbole, emphasizing teamwork, and above all highlighting the critical thinking necessary to rise above one’s fear and pain and accomplish the mission. Greitens does not paint himself as a grizzled veteran, but during his deployments he learned valuable lessons about himself, the essence of service, and leadership.
The book’s lack of a specific chronology is part of its subtle message: it is not the quantity or length of one’s experiences but their cumulative effect that is important, and the subsequent impact of the resulting action. In a fitting vignette he cites the case of Henri Dunant, a businessman who found himself near the aftermath of the battle of Solferino in northern Italy in 1859. Dunant spent two days helping the thousands of wounded and dying troops. He later wrote a book, printed at his own expense, and traveled Europe promoting his idea of a neutral organization that would provide care to wounded soldiers. Leaders of the Geneva Society for Public Welfare took up Dunant’s plan and created the International Committee of the Red Cross. One can draw a straight line between this example and the foundation Greitens started (The Mission Continues) after leaving active service in 2007, which provides fellowships through nonprofit organizations to veterans so they may “serve again as a citizen leader” upon returning to society.
Greitens proposes no grand solutions and generalizes only on occasion, and he never postures. He remains true to his thesis: that life requires purpose, purpose provides intention, and intention begets action. The point he repeatedly stresses is that if everyone does this, each in his or her own way—the world becomes a better place.
The Heart and the Fist tells the story of how individuals find purpose in what they do, and what they can accomplish with self-generated opportunities. It is told with wisdom and flair. Young people should read it to learn what is possible; older readers will realize that progress is always achievable if it comes from within.
Battle for the City of the Dead: In the Shadow of the Golden Dome, Najaf, August 2004
Dick Camp. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2011. 295 pp. Illus. Maps. Appen. Index. $30.
Reviewed by John R. Ballard
Dick Camp has chosen a keenly instructive battle as the subject for this fine book: the fight for Najaf, Iraq, in August 2004. It was the first to be conducted under the strategic control of the Iraqi government and the first of the Operation Iraqi Freedom campaign battles to pit Coalition forces solely against indigenous Iraqi militiamen.
The terrain of the Najaf battlefield was perhaps the most difficult of the war: urban and densely populated; well-known by the enemy and hostile to the Coalition; encumbered with headstones and debris; and much of it within close proximity to one of the holiest shrines of Islam, which had to be protected from Coalition fire at all cost. The enemy referred to in the book, the Mahdi army (“Men in Black”) included true believers who would individually assault Coalition tanks. Camp’s descriptions of the Mahdi army’s actions are quite good, as is his assessment of their leader, Muqtada al-Sadr.
The main Coalition force in Najaf was the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. While focusing on combat, Camp outlines the role of the operational headquarters (1st Marine Expeditionary Force Forward, commanded by then-Marine Brigadier General Dennis J. Hejlik) which was created to allow Marine Expeditionary Unit commander Colonel Anthony Haslam and his battalion commanders—Lieutenant Colonels John Meyer, Myles Miyamasu, and James Rainey—to lead the tactical fighting. Along the way, Camp deftly integrates the important roles of National Guard soldiers, snipers, special operations forces, and the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion into his narrative.
The book includes several useful maps and numerous text boxes with definitions of key organizations and weapons (Quds Force—a unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard; and Lockheed-Martin’s AC-130H Spectre ground-attack aircraft, for example) and combat awards earned by participants. Camp also explains different tactical approaches of Army and Marine units, the important roles of provincial governor Adnan al-Zurufi and religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the problems with weak Iraqi police and ineffective Iraqi national guard forces (demonstrating the need to train indigenous forces and fight their neighbors simultaneously), plus problems resulting from fires approvals being held at the highest (Multi-National Force-Iraq) level during combat.
Battle for the City of the Dead includes numerous first-person accounts that keep the reader in the fight. Camp’s use of “Iraqi resistance reports” is fascinating, but they seem to be underdeveloped jewels requiring additional context to bring forth a full story. The author also uses many superb photos from veterans (though some are not of fighting in Najaf). His single major shortcoming as an author is a general lack of footnotes for many quotations so that other scholars could examine in more detail the issues he raises.
Readers passionate about tactical battlefield accounts will love this book for its up-close approach and technical accuracy. Najaf was a battle that saw U.S. Army and Marine forces task-organized, both functioning at a high level of interoperability, and Iraqi forces integrated to a minimal extent and always with uncertainty. All of these factors would decisively mark the next two years of the war but were relatively unknown at the time. It was also a battle ultimately decided more by compromise and political infighting than it was by the force of arms. Among his parting shots, Camp opens the door to the cleanup and civil military operations conducted in Najaf, which was one of the great underreported accomplishments of the early years of the war.
The book can be read profitably by three very different audiences. Most will enjoy the story of the battle and the book’s insights at the tactical level. It is an action-packed tale of brave men at war under very demanding circumstances. But it also can be read to gain valuable information about the operational challenges of the fighting during the 2004–05 timeframe—operational issues such as rules of engagement, command and control, and Coalition integration and battlespace management all come into sharp focus in Camp’s chronological telling.
Finally, this story of one battle also illuminates some of the most complex and least-understood issues of the entire Iraq War at the strategic, national level: the differences among Shiites and Sunnis, the political role of Islam in Iraq, the weaknesses of provincial and national governance after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the complex role of the multinational force under Iraqi sovereignty. All are made quite vivid in this book. Battle for the City of the Dead is a superb combat study for every student of the Iraq War, well worth the purchase price.
A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan
Dov S. Zakheim. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2011. 296 pp. Illus. Notes. Index. $32.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
If news accounts are anything to go by, the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have faded into relatively minor affairs. This peculiar fact has been widely commented upon. The subject—the essential invisibility of these campaigns in day-to-day national life—has become a body of knowledge in its own right. One nationally respected columnist recently observed that during World War II, advertisements regularly touted the popularity of this or that item among U.S. soldiers. The producers of consumer goods—from chewing gum manufacturers to the makers of locomotives—thought it sound business to emphasize the union of sympathy between themselves and America’s soldiery. Such a thing is nearly impossible to imagine today.
The paradox is that the current campaigns have generated a niche market comprising a vast inventory of publications: memoirs, fiction, history, sociology, medical commentaries, and so on. With operations in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently winding down, it would seem that there’s little left to be said on the subject. Perhaps it’s time for the legion of contemporary writers on both campaigns to yield the stage to posterity.
A Vulcan’s Tale, however, is a late but very much welcome addition to the tower of books on the current war in Afghanistan. Zakheim’s memoir offers an indispensable perspective to future historians. The book is also a useful primer for aspiring flag officers whose operational know-how has yet to be complemented by experience in the policy and programming world.
Zakheim served as comptroller of the Department of Defense from May 2001 to April 2004. In 2002, he also took on the responsibility of coordinating DOD efforts for Afghan civil reconstruction. He worked closely with seven other influential advisers to President George W. Bush during the months leading up to the campaigns and for several years afterward. These eight advisers were known within policy circles as “the Vulcans” (hence the book’s title).
The heart of Zakheim’s argument is that Afghan reconstruction began to go astray once Iraq became a focal point of war strategy. Zakheim writes, “I have often wondered whether the administration needed to rush to war with Iraq.” He continues:
Delaying the invasion of Iraq by two years might have enabled Washington to win support for its cause in the United Nations, since Saddam certainly would have continued to stonewall the UN weapons inspectors. Alternatively, by waiting until 2005, the fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction might have been made clear to all. In any event, a two-year delay would have enabled American policymakers, and those of their allies, to concentrate on Afghanistan, to pour more resources into that country, and perhaps to have finished off the Taliban and al Qaeda once and for all.
Bad management compounded bad policy. Zakheim singles out the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which failed to provide timely support to Afghan reconstruction. OMB micromanaged the allocation of funds, reconciling its decisions not with national-security strategy but with its own parochial priorities, that is, those of upper-level bureaucrats. “OMB needs to be reined in,” Zakheim concludes.
It’s hard not to admire Zakheim’s highly refined sense of integrity and his encyclopedic knowledge of budget matters, as well as his evenhandedness: no scores are settled; he’s scrupulously dispassionate when writing about those whose views clashed with his own. Never does he make himself out to be the hero of a situation or cast himself as a Cassandra, calling attention to impending disaster while benighted colleagues and superiors ignore his warnings.
Even so, Zakheim’s premise—that Afghanistan reconstruction was mismanaged—is open to question. Why are we trying to turn a wilderness populated by tribes into some sort of bourgeois democracy? There’s a time-honored saying about U.S. national-security strategy that is apropos to the current campaigns: “Nuke ’em, bribe ’em, or leave ’em alone,” with the “leave ’em alone” choice predominating. The big question that goes begging here and in most other books on this subject is what would have been so wrong with conducting a punitive expedition—followed by a stern warning to the Taliban: entertain terrorists again, and the response will be ten times worse. This book is well written; the tragedy is that it needed to be written at all.
The Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions
Alan D. Zimm. Havertown, PA: Casement Publishers, 2011. 464 pp. Illus. Appen. Index. $32.95.
Reviewed by Chief Warrant Officer Ronald W. Russell, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired)
While excellent works covering the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor exist in abundance, nothing previously published has offered such a close examination of Japanese strategy. But this is the approach taken by Dr. Alan Zimm, a retired U.S. Navy commander and a research analyst at Johns Hopkins University. His book is far from a simple retelling of the familiar tale; instead, he has presented an in-depth study of the Japanese’ planning, preparation, and execution of the attack, with particular focus on factors not thoroughly considered by other historians, if at all.
Zimm’s book is full of revelations that counter common perceptions. Chief among them concerns Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s fundamental strategy in starting a war with America. As the common interpretation goes, the Combined Fleet commander sought to cripple the U.S. Navy in the Pacific so violently that the Americans would immediately be forced to the negotiating table, which he would accomplish by destroying their aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor, or failing that, their battleships. The author demonstrates that theory to be quite wrong. Despite his reputation as a champion of naval aviation, the record clearly shows that Yamamoto wanted battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor, to the exclusion of carriers if necessary. His extensive prewar experience in the United States had shown that the public loved their battleships, viewing them as romantic icons of America’s power and worldly influence. To have them smashed into oily scrap in one terrible stroke would have been an untenable horror, a deflating of the American ego that would compel a negotiated peace. Thus, Yamamoto’s real target was neither American carriers nor American battleships, but the American people themselves.
But the book’s primary thrust is an analysis of the Japanese strategy, tactics, and execution at Pearl Harbor, among which the author finds no end of failures. Lessons learned during wargaming and rehearsals were disregarded, aircraft were illogically assigned to targets, crucial intelligence was ignored, and the plan did not take into account variable conditions over the target area. Worse, the initial attack was badly fumbled by the flight leader, Mitsuo Fuchida, who botched a prearranged tactical signal as the formation approached the island of Oahu. His dive bombers reacted to the errant signal by attacking prematurely, thus initiating a sequence that got four of the torpedo planes shot down. As the author put it, they “went into the attack with the same level of organization as the Kentucky Derby after the horses are turned loose.”
To add to that near-debacle, a substantial portion of the strike was wasted on attacking empty carrier anchorages, leading to ordnance directed at secondary targets of no importance. In the end, only 11 of 40 torpedoes hit what Yamamoto sent them for, and only one bomb, albeit another “shot heard ’round the world,” did any significant damage by sinking the USS Arizona (BB-39).
Zimm’s analysis of the raid includes a host of what-if scenarios, including the enemy’s failure to bomb Pearl Harbor’s fuel tanks and shipyard facilities. A detailed analysis of the containment features of the tank farm, matched against the aircraft that could muster for a third strike, reveals that fears about the Pacific Fleet being forced back to California due to lack of fuel are exaggerated. Even with several tanks ruptured, the chances of fire were minimal, and the quantity of lost fuel compared with that on board the Fleet’s tankers was more than sufficient to keep the ships where they were. Operations in the central Pacific would have been postponed, but that was going to happen in any case. Similarly, concerns about damage to the shipyard ignored the yard’s resilience in the face of the limited effort a third strike could have mounted against it.
The book is peppered with charts and tables supporting the author’s findings, and a substantial photo selection further supports key points. There is very little to criticize other than the need to keep a bookmark in the glossary due to the liberal use of acronyms and Japanese terms.
Attack on Pearl Harbor is not revisionist history, nor can it replace any of the traditional comprehensive accounts of the raid. Instead, it ably supplements those accounts with detailed analyses that lead to a much better understanding of exactly what the Japanese did, why they did it, and especially how the attack was very nearly an abject failure instead of a stunning success.