Books

So I ended 2009 with 116 books read. Not bad… and it confirms my suspicion that I spend entirely too much money on books.

Of those books, my favorites were:

• Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)
A surprisingly good–albeit long–read. Captain Queeg is insane. If you’re interested in psychology and the US Navy circa WW2, I’d recommend it.
• Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster)
No surprise here. I’ve read this book every year since second grade.
• Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Jim Sheeler)
Have you seen Taking Chance? This book is about the same thing and about a hundred times sadder. There’s a picture of a sailor escorting his best friend’s body home that is permanently imprinted on my brain.
• Fixing Hell (Larry C. James)
Written by the Army psychologist sent into Abu Gharib after the scandal broke to find out why and make sure it didn’t happen again. Behavioral psychology and the Army — two of my favorite things.
• From Baghdad with Love: A Marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava (Jay Kopelman)
Touching… plus the picture of Lava on the cover reminds me of Bones

(And as always, I loved everything I read by Nora Roberts, Debbie Macomber, and Linda Lael Miller.)

My least favorites?

• Julie and Julia (Julie Powell)
I’m not opposed to the occasional f-bomb in a book — one of my favorite types of books is military memoirs. I am opposed to dropping it in ever other sentence because you’re not as great a writer as you think are. Plus, the book is supposed to be about cooking, but she manages to drop in criticisms of Republicans about once a page. And not justified criticism, mostly just name calling. Yes Julie, we get it: You hate Republicans. One of the very few books I’ve ever taken back to the store to get my money back. Julie Powell is an immature self centered brat.
• The Lucy Stone books (Leslie Meier)
I love mysteries. I love cheesy mysteries (hello, I read all the Hannah Swensen books!). These books are just… blah. I couldn’t get into them. I couldn’t even get through them when I was in student pool at OCS going through about a book a day and reading anything I could get my hands on to make time pass. I made my way through two and gave up on the series. The stories aren’t very interesting and I can’t stand the main character.

Someone was unoriginal…

… since Schweikart’s book (America’s Victories) came out over two years ago, and Bing West’s book comes out tomorrow, my money’s on West.

While I’m Announcing Movies/Shows…

HBO is finally putting on the miniseries “Generation Kill” (in July). I’ve been waiting for this forever – the trailer looks good, and I really liked the book. The book is written by a Evan Wright, a journalist (of sorts) who embedded with their unit, which was one of the first Marine Recon Units to go into Iraq in 2003.

Here’s the trailer:

Actually more than Generation Kill, I liked Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, which is a book about the same unit at the same time period (more or less) from the Marines’ point of view instead of a Rolling Stone journalist’s point of view. That’s the book that got me interested in the military to begin with.

I <3 Borders

I worked at Borders for a year between undergrad and grad school, and you think that by this point, I would be sick of it and never want to step foot in another one again. Yes, I had some crazy customers (including the one who threw a book at my head because we asked him to leave after we caught him shoplifting, and the guy who had a compulsion for buying books whose mom actually called and told us not to sell him books anymore), but I loved pretty much every day there.

I got a 30% Borders Rewards coupon and I’m heading to DC on Tuesday to do some interviewing for summer jobs, so I figured I might as well pick up a book (or two, or three) for the plane ride. I also needed to buy the last of the required books for my NPS class (Intro to Civil-Military Relations, which is my favorite class this semester). For a normal person, this probably would have been a half an hour, forty minute task – pick up a new paperback from the paperback table (which is so badly maintained at the Sand City Borders that it actually pains me to look at it), pick up Fiasco, pay and leave. I somehow ended up at Borders for almost THREE HOURS.

I actually have a running list of books that I want to read and I usually keep the top 5 (out of about 50) in a list in my wallet, but I always get distracted by other books.

Yesterday, after I wandered through the new releases section, then checked on my regular authors in Mystery and Romance (yeah, I read romance…), I headed to the history section. I’m one of those people who likes to read as much as possible on one topic then move to the next one, sometimes related, sometimes not. For the past few months, I’ve been reading about wars: I started with Iraq, then Afghanistan, and then Vietnam. Logically the next one should be Korea, and I do have The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam on my list, but it’s still hardcover, and I somehow found myself in the general military history section.

I was browsing, and this old man next to me says, “Are you looking for military books? Because this is a good one.” This was Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts by Robert Kaplan, which is also on my list, and also still hardcover, but this led to a discussion of one of Kaplan’s other books – Imperial Grunts, which branched into a discussion of other books, which led to him buying two other books that I recommended for him, and then him leaving because he said he couldn’t afford any more books…

Then I saw a book about Delta Force that I’ve never read (rare… pretty much any book ever published on Special Forces is on my bookshelf), so I started flipping through that, and this guy started to talking to me about Special Forces books. He’s up at DLI, and he’s Army Special Forces studying Arabic. That was a pretty cool conversation, and that ate up another 40 minutes or so.

The last place I browsed was the Russia/Soviet history, and I didn’t see anything that interested me more than the Spying on the Bomb, which actually was on my list of books to read, so I headed for the cash register… then got distracted by the 50% book rack, where I spent another hour or so browsing.

That’s what bookstores have that Amazon (and other websites) don’t – interacting with people and getting/making recommendations, full conversations that have nothing to do with books, browsing and finding things you would never have seen before, and eating large chunks out of your day

(Ok, so Amazon does make recommendations and you can browse on there… but it’s just not the same).

As a sidenote, if anyone wants to make recommendations for me, feel free I’m always looking for new books.

Russian Reading Challenge

One of my friends passed on this website to me and I thought it was kind of neat. Basically, it’s an idea by someone who has been interested in Russian history for a long time, but who hasn’t been exposed to very much Russian literature, so she’s going to tackle some books this year and is inviting people to join her. The suggested number of books to choose is 4 – I picked 5, but only because I don’t expect to finish the 5th one, I just want to make a dent in it.

So here’s my list:
1. “The Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn
2. “Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov
3. “Dead Souls” by Gogol
4. “In The War” and Other Stories by Vasily Grossman
5. “Anna Karenina” by Tolstoy (Actually in Russian…. I won it in my first Russian class, but have been too intimidated to start it)

Here’s the website if you’re interested

Book Review: Boredom by Day, Death by Night

By Sgt Seth Conner, USMC

I also read a book that was not bad this week, which is good because I couldn’t have handled two bad books in one week. First things first. I randomly ordered this book from Amazon because it was in my recommendations and I liked the title. It was written as a diary while Conner was in Iraq (and a little bit before he left and when he came back). Originally there were no thoughts of it being published – it was edited for basic grammar and understanding, but other than that it is raw thoughts and emotions.

We all know by now that I love to read war memoirs. As much as I love to read them, what kills me is when the author pulls the “I was the greatest soldier who ever lived and nothing would have happened without me.” There isn’t any of that in Conner’s book. He does stupid things and feels bad about them or wishes that he could be a better person and everything else is pretty matter of fact, as if he describing routine trips to the store. And in a way, I’m sure over the course of his time in Iraq, his work did get to be routine, but he doesn’t pretend it was otherwise. It’s very honest and down to earth.

I don’t know if he ever said his age, but I’m thinking 21 or 22. You can tell that he’s young, especially in the first pages, when he describes his life over the past year (a little scandalous… but honestly, I know some Marines and that’s how a lot of the young guys are). As the book goes on, he flips back and forth between growing up, which is usually most apparent when something is happening and he has to be in charge, and being young, which you can see when he’s missing girls and talking about partying when he gets back. It’s hard because I have a friend in the Marines in Iraq right now, and Seth’s writing style reminds me of my friend, so I felt very connected to the him. At the same time, he’s close to my age and I can relate to a lot of what he’s saying, like his struggle with a relationship with God, but at the same time I can’t, like when he talks about the deaths of some of his guys.

We hear a lot from soldiers in this war, probably more than anytime in history, but this is the first type of uncensored account I have read. I don’t mean censored in a “the military reads my blog before I can post it” way: in a private diary, you write more openly than you would on a blog and a lot of the other memoirs are more to tell stories of specific events than to talk about thoughts and reactions. Even in books like “Blog of War” and “Operation Homecoming“, you get only glimpses into people. This is an in depth look, and it’s pretty amazing.

I’ve heard a lot of older people saying that my generation is the downfall of our country (um hello, did you forget hippies?), and we’re spoiled and lazy and whatnot, but they should read this book. Yeah, we have our flaws – and who doesn’t?- but we have our good points too. This book showcases everything. Read it.

Book Review: Fair Play

by James Olson

I’m in the middle of my Vietnam reading spree right now, but this book was recommended to me by my friend when we were driving back from Montreal and I thought it sounded interesting, so I bought it. I’ve read lots of books about spying, but none that focused on the ethics of spying.

The book is not one that you will sit and read in one sitting (unless you’re trapped overnight in an airport and finish your other book, in which case you just might). The author worked for the CIA for a long time and now teaches intelligence at Texas A&M, so he is certainly qualified to write a book on the morality of spying.

In the book, Olson lays out fifty scenarios based loosely on real life events (my favorite being about kamikaze dolphins), then presents a decision that must be made. He surveyed a wide variety of people – ranging from intelligence officers to students to soldiers to professors – and includes all of their opinions before explaining his own.

Some of the decisions are really hard to make and it was surprising to me to see how black and white it was for some people. There were instances when I couldn’t make up my mind and the first opinion was simply someone saying, “Absolutely not, not in any case is that ever acceptable.” There are also times when someone would respond with “It’s morally right, but legally wrong” or “It’s morally right, but strategically wrong”, which gave me a newfound appreciation for how many angles have to be considered before decisions can be made, but also made me wonder which angle should trump others if there is a conflict. Is legally wrong ok if it’s morally right? Can something be strategically right and legally right, but morally wrong, and what do you do if that happens? Who decides what is morally right?

Sometimes you will reaffirm your opinions and sometimes you’ll question them, but you will always be thinking – and in my opinion, that means it’s a good book.

(… I need to review a bad book, so people won’t think I always give good book reviews…)

Book Review: The Village

by Bing West

I said that I wanted to review some books, and now that I’m settled into my new apartment and have internet but no friends to go out with yet and I’ve rewatched all three seasons of American Dreams (WHY did they cancel that show?!), I figured now is a good time to review them.

First, let me preface this by saying that I haven’t read very many books about Vietnam, and the majority of books I’ve read have either been short stories (The Things They Carried, Dispatches) or about coming home (Achilles in Vietnam, Homecoming, Stolen Valor). This is one of the first actual war books I’ve read about Vietnam, and I picked it because Bing West wrote No True Glory, which I enjoyed.

It’s about a group of 15 Marines who are assigned to live in a hamlet to help the village police defend the village against the Vietcong, who are attacking and terrorizing the inhabitants nearly every night. Over the course of the assignment, half of the original group of Marines are killed, but the surviving Marines are fiercely dedicated to the village and the villagers.

The extent to which the Marines are integrated into the village is amazing. The villagers love the Marines, inviting them over for tea and dinner, and at one point even siding with a Marine against another villager in a fight. The Marines unofficially adopt a mistreated orphan boy, and some of them learn to speak Vietnamese. Interestingly, it is the college students who return home to the village on break who demand the Marines leave, and the villagers who defend the presence of the Marines.

You also see how frustrating counterinsurgency is – best shown in an ongoing battle over the placement of a fence: The PF builds it, the VC takes it down, the PF rebuilds, the VC destroys, and so on and so on, until the PFs attach explosives. In all the time the Marines are in the village, they never truly defeated the VC – at best, they were a temporary solution and when they are finally removed from the village, the VC takes over again.

West revisited the village in 2002 and describes the shrine that the villagers have built in memorial of the fallen Marines, which surprisingly has not been removed by the VC. Sort of ironic that so many Americans condemned the military for Vietnam, but the Vietnamese built memorials for them, huh?

Anyways, the book reads quickly, and I would recommend it (and have recommended it, more than once!) to anyone with an interest in counterinsurgency or Vietnam. It’s well worth the $7.99… and if you like it, read No True Glory.

Book Review: Lone Survivor

by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson

Какая хорошая книга!

… just kidding, I’m not writing this in Russian. The pledge doesn’t start until tomorrow. I did finish the book on the plane over here though, so here you go.

In all seriousness though, this is one of the better books I’ve ever heard, up there with One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, although I liked One Bullet Away more. I may be slightly biased because the book is about Navy SEALs… and we all know how I feel about SEALs [One Bullet Away, as a side note, is about Marines]

Lone Survivor is the story of a four man team in Afghanistan that was ambushed by a group of Taliban after a poor choice (influenced by the MSM, whom we all know and love) and ended in the most number of deaths suffered by a SEAL team (11 SEALs and 8 Army SF). Luttrell, the author, was the the sole survivor from the group, which continues to haunt him. He says he still has nightmares where he hears his friends crying him to help them. (I’ll admit that I cried).

What gets you most about the book is how fiercely dedicated each man is to his teammates. One of the men shoots to provide cover for another even after being shot in the hand. Another goes straight into the fire to pull another man to (relative) safety. Their leader sacrifices himself in an attempt to make sure backup will arrive. There is nothing that would make these guys give up. I’ve heard some people say it’s stupid to sacrifice your life for someone who’s not going to make it, but you really see how these SEALs draw strength from knowing that they will not not be left behind and they will all fight as long as they are able – no matter what. Those guys are freaking amazing.

There’s also a section about BUD/S, which is always interesting to read about. Plus Luttrell’s class is the one covered by Dick Couch in The Warrior Elite(another good book).

Another interesting point that gets brought up is how the influence of the American public and main stream media are affecting the way we conduct our wars. War is a dirty business, and we’re not going to win by placing limits on ourselves that the other side doesn’t obey. This does not mean I’m condoning torture (my definition of torture, which does not include humiliation or loud music or strobe lights), but simply that I’m recognizing the fact that the other side plays dirty. The best defense is a good offense. None of this ‘no shooting until you’re shot at’ business. When the people critiquing the military’s techniques go out and fight, maybe I’ll allow them some say in how we fight the war. Probably not though… I like to win.

I really wish I could be a Navy SEAL. *sigh*

Go buy the book. Read it as soon as you can.

Book Review: Endgame

by Lt. General Thomas McInerney (USAF, Ret.) and Maj. General Paul Vallely (US Army, Ret.)

The authors both have extensive military experience and now work as military analysts for FOX News. Before I go on, let me point out – this book is offered as their opinion on how to win the war on terror. That said, I think their plan has more good points than bad.

The authors advance a policy of regime change. And while this may be an ideal solution (a world where we dictate the leaders of every country would have to be supportive of US interests, although markedly undemocratic), it is somewhat unrealistic. We will soon have to take action to disarm Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs, stop Russian and Chinese aid to rogue nuclear programs, and get Pakistan’s weapons secured, but when we’re taking so much flak already for going after state sponsors of terrorism (cough cough Iraq ) I’m not sure how the authors plan to carry out these campaigns. We’re still in Iraq after 4 years, and I don’t know that we can manage invasions of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, etc., while we simultaneously attempt to restore order to Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is a discussion of creating a new alliance, with a specific goal of destroying the web of terrorist groups, but I’m not quite sure how effective that would be. Theoretically, isn’t that what the UN sort of is? Global police? And we all know how effective the UN is (or is not, as the case may be). But even if we did form such an alliance, how many of them would stay with us as we steadily worked through the regimes of the Middle East and Central Asia? Maybe I’m getting too cynical and there are still some countries with guts, but I just don’t know.

Anyway, the authors’ insight into the changes to the military and warfare for the GWOT are interesting, as are the worst case scenarios that may result if we do not act quickly and decisively to disrupt the global network of terror.

The analysis of the status of Iraq is a bit too optimistic in my opinion and seems to ignore the activity of the insurgents there now, but since most of the media is entirely too pessimistic and the book is three years old, I’m willing to give them a break on that.

All in all, a pretty good thought provoking book.

Next on the list… Lone Survivor. It’s going to be amazing, but it will probably make me cry.