Action takes a rear guard to the human element in this compelling account of a soldier’s mission being accomplished.
U.S. Air Force veteran Banzet reports with a proud airman’s-eye view (and some humor) on his enlistment and posting to Iraq and America’s effort to rebuild the Iraqi military in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s shattered dictatorship.
Occasional salvos of fierce political op-ed—pro-Bush, anti-“liberal”—pepper this robust, often humorous and thoughtful military-insider account of Air Force life and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Banzet grew up in Montana and, after marriage he enlisted in the Air Force. However, his entry was delayed and, before actually attending basic training, Banzet looked at a future of hopeless, entry-level civilian jobs. (However, as part of Banzet’s mission statement, he aims to overturn the stereotype of U.S. forces being demoralized youth who serve merely because no other employment opportunities beckon.) Once in the military, Banzet declares that America’s armed forces—even the grunts; especially the grunts—feature some of the best souls the country has to offer. He shores up that assertion with vivid descriptions of the work done by American (and British) troops repairing Iraq. Even as insurgents and Sunni–Shiite enmities took a toll on coalition endeavors (the bad news exaggerated by the media, the author asserts), Banzet helped lead the effort to retrain former Iraqi military members, many of whom, not long ago, were the enemy. A country’s armed forces reflect its essence, Banzet states, and while he encounters his share of martinets during his tour (including an “intel guy” worthy of Get Smart), the Saddam dictatorship had sired an especially dysfunctional military culture of sycophancy, incompetence and corruption. Banzet writes of instilling in his new Iraqi cadets an Air Force–style discipline, honor (performing duties for a greater Iraq, not out of fear) and leadership. He doesn’t excuse the POW abuse at Abu Ghraib but does emphasize that it was an exception to the rule; most Iraqis felt safer under occupying American troops. For skeptics seeking a rationale for what made Iraq such a priority target after 9/11, the book only offers a warmed-over take on Bush Doctrine, with the qualifier that Saddam’s forces were in such shambles it’s no wonder the CIA got bad info about weapons of mass destruction. Banzet’s wit is a WMD itself, and readers might guess he detests democrats even more than Saddam; fortunately, instead of talk-radio bloviating, most of the time he uses solid storytelling and eyewitness examples to maintain that the U.S. presence in Iraq was beneficial to and appreciated by the Baghdad locals he came to know. The book would nonetheless benefit from a glossary of terminology, acronyms and jargon peculiar to the Gulf Wars.
Action takes a rear guard to the human element in this compelling account of a soldier’s mission being accomplished.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2012
ISBN: 9781478271291
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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