Fall in place, readers, for autumn in new work — with topics that range from COIN to comic books, college football to canines, commanding, casualties and Section 60. Themes range from strategy to no strategy, and from loss to hope. Here’s a guide:
My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner, W.W. Norton, 240 pages, $23.95
That’s as a foreign country, not in, which is the first clue that this memoir takes a nontraditional approach.
“Mosul is inside me,” the former soldier writes, and flying back to the States is “a process that takes years and years.” The author of the praised poetry collection “Here, Bullet” (2005) says “the point is to become one with the moment.”
That’s also good advice for reading the prose segments, two poems and a Super8 movie script presented in a nonlinear sequence that is not for the faint of heart. However, the 136 moments — individually and collectively — mesmerize like “metal given irrevocable intention” and “the meditative quality of playing catch.”
Turner pitches a narrative that he has “carried with me all my adult life,” including stories of war fighters in his family. In World War II, his movie-going uncle spotted Turner’s grandfather in a newsreel showing Marines “approaching the beaches of Guam” — but “a few frames later Papa’s landing craft took a direct hit.”
He loses inhibitions. In Iraq he cannot “imagine sharing” at “Poetry Nite!” at the chow hall. “Maybe I just didn’t want to show how vulnerable and sensitive and afraid I was ...”
He matures after enlisting “because I knew that on some deep and immutable level, I would leave and I would never come back.” Now he goes back and forth in this vast country that is “not large enough to contain the war each soldier brings home.”
His precise writing reminds a nation that some veterans were combat soldiers once, “giants standing over the model of someone else’s life.” By showing his life, Turner invites others “to become the camera” too.
The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War by Yochi Dreazen, Crown, 320 pages, $26
In 2003, Mark and Carol Graham’s 22-year-old son Kevin, who has been hiding anti-depression pills from fellow Army ROTC cadets, hangs himself.
Eight months later, a roadside bomb kills their other son, Army 2nd Lt. Jeff Graham, 25, in Iraq.
“We can let losing the boys be two tragic chapters in the book of our lives,” Mark tells Carol, “or we can let it be the whole book.”
They opt for chapters. Mark, who left the Army as a major general in 2012, and Carol, whose grief makes her consider suicide and exorcism, are the focus of a “Foreign Policy” editor’s enthralling and enraging report about the Army’s traditional stigma about mental illness. Many suicides and murders “could potentially have been prevented” if leaders “had better monitored the emotional state of their troops.”
At Fort Carson, Colorado, where the suicide rate is “far higher than the overall rates in both the military and civilian worlds,” Mark begins to monitor soldiers’ treatment so much that some staffers “talk about how Mark wanted to babysit all these troops who should really be thrown out of the army.”
But former embedded reporter Dreazen, diagnosed with PTSD, convincingly says that “we, as a country, should do no less” than what Mark and Carol do. One reason? Of 38,364 suicides in the U.S. in 2010, “veterans accounted for 9,000.”
Knife Fights: An Education in Modern War by John A. Nagl, Penguin Press, 286 pages, $27.95
From the guy who wrote the book about counterinsurgency — co-wrote the Army-Marine Corps field manual that followed his published Oxford dissertation — comes a memoir that follows “the arc of my own learning curve” about modern war, “an intellectual coming-of-age story” about the author and the U.S. military.
That sounds noble, but Nagl — frequently self-deprecating — makes this guide (due Oct. 20) conversational rather than convoluted. At times, it reads like a who’s who in counterintelligentsia. COIN might not always make sense, but the book does.
In 2002, he is “unconvinced of the need for the invasion” of Iraq, which was “a recipe for insurgency” and “united Iraq behind a common cause ... killing Americans,” including 22 soldiers in his tank force in 2004.
“All the things I’d read about that were required to succeed in counterinsurgency were a lot harder than they’d seemed in the books, including the one I’d written,” he writes, referring to his “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife,” which explains this title. But the military must “prepare for all possible wars rather than only for the ones that it wants to fight,” and “the question is not whether the classic [COIN] principles of clear, hold and build work ...
“The question is whether the extraordinary investment of time, blood and treasure required to make them work is worth making.”
One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War by Bing West, Random House, 282 pages, $27
The author, a Vietnam veteran, a deputy secretary of defense three decades ago and a proven writer (and father of one), says this is his “final book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He goes out not with a whimper but a bang-up look at the Afghanistan angst of 3rd Platoon of Battalion 3/5 during “a war of attrition, not counterinsurgency.”
Doctrine is “gibberish,” strategy “squishy” and “flimsy,” and “man-dress” remains a suitable description for a different culture’s garment. Gen. Stanley McChrystal preaches “a theory of benevolent war,” and Gen. David Petraeus’ Taliban strategy must “be carefully read and parsed several times to extract meaning.” “Mr. Bush” and “Mr. Obama” fare poorly, too.
But “a flawed war policy can coexist with a soldier’s determination to fight for his country,” and the heart of the story — and of the author, who embedded for the umpteenth time — is with 50 Marines in Sangin Province in 2010-11.
Despite 27 casualties, including two deaths during seven months of patrols that total 1,000,000 steps, “inspiration, leadership, firepower, aggressiveness, steadiness and raw spirit” bring cohesion, and “the platoon went forth to fight and kill the Taliban.”
“We fought,” says Lance Cpl. Colbey Yazzie, “because we were so pissed off about everything.”
War Dogs: Tales of Canine Heroism, History, and Love by Rebecca Frankel, Palgrave MacMillan, 256 pages, $26
Another “Foreign Policy” editor writes about military war dogs on her magazine’s website, and she believes the dogs’ handlers “are their own breed” — forgivable wordplay in a “Tales” about tails.
The dogs, usually German or Belgian shepherds, are described as “furry but devoted” weapons, fighters, soldiers and guardians. Devil dawgs, so to speak.
“A canine’s sense of smell is a thousand times more sensitive than a human’s,” its field of vision “more encompassing,” and its hearing “hundreds of times more powerful than ours.”
But the relationship between the handler and the handled is “built first on a mutual trust, one that can flourish into something more intimate — trust with a greater sense of loyalty and even love,” and the examples affectingly prove the bond.
Section 60, Arlington National Cemetery: Where War Comes Home by Robert M. Poole, Bloomsbury, 256 pages, $27
The first profile in this book, due Oct. 21, is the Iraq war’s first combat casualty buried in the section, Army Capt. Russell B. Rippetoe — the son of a retired lieutenant colonel who is 66 when he and his wife bury their 27-year-old son.
Other anguishing stories from the 14 acres include those of an Army master sergeant who is a suicide victim and a private first class who is a victim of friendly fire.
For friends and family of the fallen — one cemetery visitor is a Chicago woman who is alive because she has a soldier’s transplanted heart — Section 60 is “our memorial for Iraq and Afghanistan, like the Vietnam wall.”
Don’t Wait for the Next War: A Strategy for American Growth and Global Leadership by Wesley K. Clark, PublicAffairs, 242 pages, $26.99
The retired four-star Army general, comfortable in war rooms and boardrooms, says most businesses have a “corporate vision and a strategy,” and the U.S. needs one, too. One that “addresses the long-term issues confronting the U.S. at home and abroad.”
War provides an opportunity for building a strategy, but the sometime presidential candidate says terrorism, cybersecurity, the economy, China and climate change are five reasons not to wait for a combat-induced plan.
“The threat of force is more useful ... than its deployment,” especially when backed up with “economic potential.”
Rise: a Soldier, a Dream, and a Promise Kept by Daniel Rodriguez with Joe Layden, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pages, $26
The soldier-turned-football player and his co-writer (“more than 30 books” including work with retired Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman and Medal of Honor recipient Salvatore Giunta) tell Rodriguez’s turnabout trip to Clemson University.
The “indifferent” high-school student is now ashamed of his “immaturity and selfishness,” especially after the horrific Battle of Kamdesh. (Jake Tapper’s outstanding “The Outpost” also notes Rodriguez’s action there). Rodriguez ends up with a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, PTSD and a near-attempted suicide that is thwarted because first “I gotta cut the f------ grass” on his late father’s lawn.
Ultimately he realizes that “if I didn’t do something with my life, then the Taliban would have won the war and my friends would have died in vain.”
Comics and Conflict: Patriotism and Propaganda From WWII through Operation Iraqi Freedom by Cord A. Scott, 224 pages, Naval Institute Press, $49.95
With themes of “realism, politics and aesthetics,” comic books “both mirrored and manufactured popular attitudes to war,” says the scholar and fan.
Comics also “directly reflect their audience’s fantasies, nightmares, and delusions.” For example, writers worry “that children might expect Superman (1938), with his incredible powers, to resolve [World War II] by himself” so they keep him out of the military. Instead Clark Kent shows how civilians “play important parts in the war effort.”
Satire also has a part, and “the concept of patriotic superheroes pursuing political and military goals came to an apex in 1987 with ‘Reagan’s Raiders.’ ”
That cover is one of only eight illustrations, a low number that is kryptonite in a survey of art.
Take Command: Lessons in Leadership: How to Be a First Responder in Business by Jake Wood, Crown, 256 pages, $25
The Team Rubicon co-founder, a former Marine sniper, “fairly average” college football player and “evolving” leader, believes “we all need to learn how to be first responders in our jobs and careers.”
His “tool kit,” out Oct. 14, offers advice including an at-a-glance “mission brief” at the end of each chapter, with points such as, “It’s your job to prioritize and communicate; it’s your team’s job to execute!” and, “Transparency breeds trust, and trust is critical when everything is on the line.”
Future editions could benefit from a reading list or bibliography, and perhaps an explanation of why the Marine Corps has engaged the J. Walter Thompson agency for six decades when the author says the Corps developed its “legendary brand” without “marketing dollars.”
When Britain Burned the White House: The 1814 Invasion of Washington by Peter Snow, Thomas Dunne, 320 pages, $25.99
“The British invasion of Washington is not an episode in their history that Americans recall with much relish,” says the British journalist who credits President James Madison, “a schoolmaster dressed up for a funeral,” with the “ill conceived and mismanaged war” of 200 years ago.
Snow says “the clarity, humanity and wit of British and American men and women who were there bring the story alive as if it had happened today.” He can take credit for bringing those attributes to the page.
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