An honest, revealing glimpse of the dangers inherent in acting on good intentions based on ignorance.
A U.S. Marine recounts his experiences in combat leading the first Iraqi Army battalion trained by the American military.
“Americans had never built a Middle Eastern army from scratch in the middle of a war,” writes Zacchea, who directs the UConn Entrepreneur Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities. In 2004, the author was assigned to do just that in Iraq, whose existing army had been disbanded by Paul Bremer, leader of the U.S. occupation, early in the Iraq War. In this military memoir and cautionary tale, the author describes the mind-boggling challenge of training a unit comprising rival ethnic and religious groups without any special preparation whatsoever. Then a 35-year-old lieutenant colonel, Zacchea received no language training or advice on the history and culture of the region; he arrived to find himself lacking equipment and support needed to train poor, illiterate recruits who showed no desire to be just like Americans. “We think they want to be inclusive, pluralistic, merit-driven, and maybe even secular,” he writes. “They do not.” His on-the-ground experiences shaped his view that the U.S. has yet to learn that “there are limits to how much it can change other people, other places, other religions.” His well-paid recruits—they often disappeared after payday—looted with impunity, honored wasta (clout), valued patronage over merit, and evinced mixed motives for joining the army. They never embraced the idea of an inclusive Iraq. Few knew how to drive, most considered guns status symbols rather than useful tools, and desertion was commonplace. Nonetheless, Zacchea managed to create “a reliable corps of soldiers,” for which he received Iraq’s top military honor. Much of his somewhat rambling account focuses on efforts to overcome ethnic rivalries, distrust between U.S. and Iraqi troops, and the problems caused by clashing values and traditions. He offers vivid accounts of base life, urban combat in Fallujah, and his close friendship with one Iraqi soldier.
An honest, revealing glimpse of the dangers inherent in acting on good intentions based on ignorance.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61373-841-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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