Ground War: The Iraq Surge Grunts Knew: "The Good Soldiers"

[groovedaddy]

The Iraq war in David Finkel’s heart-stopping new book is not the Bush administration’s misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and ideological fervor meticulously chronicled by Thomas Ricks in his benchmark 2006 study, “Fiasco.” It isn’t the bungled occupation run out of the Green Zone bubble, depicted with such acuity by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his 2006 book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” And it isn’t the foreign-policy imbroglio debated year after year by neoconservatives and liberals, by politicians, Pentagon officials and pundits.

No, the war described in Mr. Finkel’s book, “The Good Soldiers,” is something far more immediate and visceral: the war as experienced on the ground, day by day, moment by moment, by members of an Army battalion sent to Baghdad during the surge in 2007.

With a novelistic sense of narrative and character, Mr. Finkel — the national enterprise editor of The Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter — shows the fallout that the decision to invade Iraq and the war’s “ruinous beginnings” would have on a group of individual soldiers, who, by various twists of fate, found themselves stationed in a hot spot on the edge of Baghdad. They are in a godforsaken place named FOB Rustamiyah, a “forward operating base” that “was the color of dirt, and stank” of raw sewage if the wind came from the east, and smelled of burning trash if the wind came from the west, a place where the nearby streets had names like Route Pluto, Dead Girl Road and Route Predators, the last of which “was constantly being seeded with hidden bombs.”

Like Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and Tim O’Brien’s “Things They Carried,” this is a book that captures the surreal horror of war: the experience of blood and violence and occasional moments of humanity that soldiers witness firsthand, and the slide shows of terrible pictures that will continue to play through their heads long after they have left the battlefield.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/books/06kakutani.html?th&emc=th

[stray cat]

1. I just bought it - the reviews have been very good