The Valley’s Edge: A Year with the Pashtuns in the Heartland of the Taliban
Daniel R. Green. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2011. 288 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by John R. Ballard
This fine small book provides a peek inside a crucial part of the war in Afghanistan that remains largely unknown to the majority of Americans: the work of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).
This innovation, designed to tailor assistance to local needs, helps link military and civil-development efforts in Afghanistan. PRTs reflect the importance placed on gaining the people’s support in a counterinsurgency effort. Because of their success in Afghanistan, they were also used during the conflict in Iraq. The Valley’s Edge provides an opportunity to better understand the important work of PRTs, through the author’s experiences in helping oust the Taliban from the desolate southern Afghan province of Uruzgan.
Daniel Green first served there from 2005 to 2006 as the State Department political adviser to a PRT there. At the time, he was new to both the U.S. government and Afghanistan. Green’s portrayal of the PRT’s work reveals how unrealistic expectations, a superficial understanding of the country, and a lack of resources contributed to the Taliban’s resurgence in that province. The author discusses the challenge of good governance in Afghanistan, the complexity of its reconstruction and development projects, and the fundamental nature of the insurgency. The PRT’s efforts to manage its huge tasks involved relationships with a variety of local personalities, including the governor of the province, local police chiefs, and a host other government and tribal officials, both major and minor.
In 2005, the PRT in which Green worked was led by a superb professional Army officer (then–Lieutenant Colonel Robin Fontes), and its security was provided by U.S. National Guard forces. The relationship between the Afghans of the province and the members of the coalition was good and improving. This reflected the emphasis that Ambassador Zal Khalilzad and Army Lieutenant General Dave Barno had been advocating in Afghanistan up to that time. Working together, they drove a counterinsurgency approach focused on building rapport with the local population and facilitating development and progress.
Unexpectedly, after Green returned to the United States following his initial tour in Uruzgan province, he did not feel relieved to be back. Instead, he describes a period when he seemed to suffer from some of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress, similar to those experienced by so many military men and women.
The author returned to Uruzgan in June 2006. What he found then was worse than the situation when he had departed a year earlier. Both locally among the people and in terms of PRT effectiveness, things had clearly gone downhill. Green has scathing comments about the new PRT commander and his policies, and the security regime that active-duty American forces had constructed since the previous summer.
Although the author does include a section on the history of the province mid-book, overall The Valley’s Edge lacks the larger context of the war. Because this is needed to put his provincial observations in perspective, the reader often remains adrift in Green’s travelogue. Still, his unvarnished look at the people involved makes the book appealing. The contributions of members of the PRT, security forces, professionals from across the U.S. government, and many, many Afghans of a great variety of backgrounds, politics, circumstances, and motives all give the reader important insights into the war effort. Of value, Green highlights the importance of non-career personnel, including National Guard and reserve-component service members and civilian augmentees of government agencies, who played a vitally important role in the campaign.
Upon his return to Afghanistan for a third tour in 2009, Green found many improvements but also saw that the fundamental problems he had experienced in Uruzgan had still not been solved, despite the Obama administration’s increased emphasis on Afghan issues. A reader can question whether desolate Uruzgan was a microcosm of the U.S. efforts to prevent Afghanistan from falling back under Taliban control, but no one should doubt that this book does an excellent job of illustrating the American efforts in the country. It also demonstrates the complexity of the pivotal development problem confronting the coalition during the Afghan war.
The Vietnam War from the Rear Echelon: An Intelligence Officer’s Memoir, 1972-1973
Timothy J. Lomperis. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. 288 pp. Notes. Index. $34.95.
Reviewed by Colonel Jonathan M. House, U.S. Army (Retired)
The United States rapidly withdrew its forces from Vietnam between 1969 and 1973, transferring the entire burden of the war back to the Republic of Vietnam. This policy appeared to work in the spring of 1972, when massive U.S. air power and logistical support helped the southern forces turn back a major conventional invasion by North Vietnam. Three years later, however, a distracted America withdrew its support, and Hanoi won the war with another massive mechanized invasion.
During the twilight period of the first invasion and American withdrawal, Timothy Lomperis had a privileged view of the war, first as a junior intelligence officer involved in planning the 1972 air strikes, and then as a civilian liaison to the Vietnamese intelligence agencies after the U.S. military departure. Lomperis has combined this personal experience with his subsequent career as an academic expert on the conflict to give the reader numerous insights into the failure of “Vietnamization.”
Historians of the war will be fascinated by the author’s description of Army General Creighton Abrams Jr.’s personal management of B-52 bombers, over vociferous Air Force objections, to turn the tide in 1972. Equally interesting is Lomperis’ role in providing targeting data “under the table” to U.S. planners after our official withdrawal. He also explains how the United States refused to accept larger Vietnamese estimates of enemy strength because higher numbers would indicate that the South could not defend itself as we claimed.
Yet this book is more than just a dry intelligence narrative. Lomperis describes his own moral odyssey from a well-intentioned anticommunist patriot to a disillusioned observer distressed by the suffering and corruption he witnessed. In so doing, he displays great empathy for the Vietnamese officials and people left behind in 1973. The author notes, for example, that the withdrawal of U.S. support had a psychological as well as a practical impact; lacking a strong sense of nationalism and effective political leaders, many Vietnamese lost hope when Washington abandoned them. Lomperis also describes the growing despair of American civilians who remained after the military left. “I knew that the [American] bulwark was disappearing. And this was the tragedy: with the bulwark gone, nothing that we or the Vietnamese did in Saigon would make any difference.” He himself decided to leave because he identified so strongly with the Vietnamese, to the point that his American superiors felt he was “going native.”
This is, in short, the model of a personal memoir enhanced by a full sense of the broader context. The book is also filled with fascinating details about daily life and government in Saigon before its fall. “If you ate in a restaurant,” Lomperis writes, “you never really knew where the food came from. If you bought anything in a store, it was seldom from the shelves, which were always incredibly bare. Rather, your host would tell you to wait. He would bark something at a minion who would scurry off somewhere and return with a suitcase full of the category of items you had asked for. Under these circumstances, it was more than mere courtesy that propelled the purchase.” The Vietnam War from the Rear Echelon is both a significant contribution to our understanding of the war and an entertaining story for the general reader.
In the Shadow of Greatness: Voices of Leadership, Sacrifice, and Service from America’s Longest War
U.S. Naval Academy Class of 2002. Joshua Welle, John Ennis, Katherine Kranz, and Graham Plaster, eds. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012. 264 pp. Illus. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, U.S. Army (Retired)
Four years ago, Bill Murphy Jr. published a book about the bicentennial graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy. In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point’s Class of 2002 (Henry Holt, 2008) told the story of a group of young men and women who came to West Point in a time of peace but, in the words of President George W. Bush at their graduation, departed “in a time of war.” Their service to the nation under fire provides a compelling narrative, with profound insights into a patriotic generation that fought in wars they did not choose and struggled to understand.
Joshua Welle, president of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 2002, has now led a team of his classmates to provide the same kind of perspective. In the Shadow of Greatness is an edited collection of some three dozen reminiscences about combat, peace, and struggle, bookended with a foreword by CNN political analyst and Harvard professor David Gergen and an epilogue by Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and member of the Academy’s Class of 1968. Mullen’s oldest son, John, is a member of the Class of 2002, though he did not contribute a piece to this book.
The stories function as windows for readers, providing a direct look into the cockpits, combat information centers, and forward operating bases that young Navy and Marine officers have filled during a decade of war. The book’s initial section, “Four Years by the Bay,” covers the Academy experience at Annapolis. This will be most revealing to those who have never themselves attended a service academy—aside from now-General John Allen’s entertaining description of his tenure as the Class of 2002’s Commandant of Midshipmen, worth any reader’s time. The five parts that follow comprise stories about peacetime service in the Fleet (“The Leadership Laboratory”), combat (“Courage under Fire”), non-combat service (“Beyond Battlefield Bullets”), ethics (“Integrity, Teamwork, and Sacrifice”), and social issues (“The Next Great Generation”). The short essays are read quickly but linger in the imagination: a female aviator who became one of the Navy’s last operational F-14 pilots; a former brigade honor captain on board the USS John McCain (DDG-56) who faced integrity challenges; a Marine who died of cancer after fighting to graduate with his class.
The book provides glimpses into the Navy/Marine Corps team’s individual communities. Perhaps most unusual is the story of the officer who transferred from the Navy to the Army. Before he served in Iraq himself, he performed what he describes as the hardest duty of his life: notifying two Army wives that their husbands had been killed in action. The reader feels the ache of pain and pride in this description of a task that no one wants, but that all who serve deeply appreciate being accomplished professionally.
Another agonizing essay is written by the mother of Richard Andersen, a helicopter pilot who helped with recovery after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina only to later be killed in a training accident. His mother had requested that his class ring be inscribed with “May God grant you strength, wisdom, and long life”—but, prophetically, there was space only for “May God grant you strength and wisdom.”
Not all the stories are as painful. Gary Ross fell in love with Dan during his sophomore year and lived a covert life as a homosexual surface warfare officer until the 2010 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” At the stroke of midnight on 21 September 2011, ten days and a decade after the al Qaeda attacks that forever marked Ross’s class and their Navy service, he and Dan became the first same-sex military couple to marry, drawing international media attention. Ross is now suing the Defense Department, claiming, like many others, that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional—in this case, because it prevents his husband from getting the military dependent’s identification card that provides access to healthcare and other benefits.
All of these stories give voice to courage, sacrifice, and the nobility of living in the service of others. In closing the book, Admiral Mullen notes that the members of this class, like those before and after it, “have kept sharp and sure the instruments by which U.S. national security is preserved.” He believes “they are positioned, because of their diverse experiences, to lead both in and out of uniform in the years to come.”
Like their counterparts at West Point and elsewhere, the members of the Naval Academy’s Class of 2002 have borne the burden of battle for the past decade. In the Shadow of Greatness shows us how they have done it. Thirty additional essays that could not be included will nevertheless be posted at the website under “About the Book,” “Additional Stories”: http://www.shadowofgreatness.com/. Every American should read them all.