The Good, The Bad and The Very, Very Delayed, Pt. 1: Actual Books
Ok, it’s been far, far too long. There have been some developments, including the replacement of my old Kindle with...a new one. The main issue with that is that I lost my status on my too-many reads in progress. This has now been “fixed” with the arrival of the new Kindle, which has let me partly-read a whole bunch of other books.
In the meantime, I’ve made very modest progress with the 積ん読 problem!
Completed Dead Tree Books:
About Face: Odyssey Of An American Warrior, David Hackworth, forward by Jocko Willink. A reissue of Hackworth’s 1989 autobiography, the book traces “Hack” as he evolves from a precocious 14 year old who lied his way into the Merchant Marine in World War 2, through a career in the Army which took him from occupation duty in Trieste, through Korea, and into Vietnam.
Hackworth is a soldier’s soldier, and was a poor fit for garrison life -- he and the Army clearly struggled at times to understand each other. Eventually the strain of fighting what he increasingly saw as a pointless war in Vietnam wore him down. He ended his career in a blaze of ignominy, speaking out against the war on television.
I picked this up because of the constant references to it by former SEAL Jocko Willink, who wrote the 2020 edition’s forward, during his podcast. Hackworth’s observations were a sort of battlefield bible, and it’s easy to see why. Many of his observations have wider application: the value of courage, training, discipline, fighting to win, and taking care of your people.
Less clear is whether the moral and ethical compass Hackworth navigated by is worth emulating. He clearly inspired those who followed him in combat. But by his own description, his treatment of the non-soldiers in his life varies from calloused to exploitative. By the end of this lengthy memoir, it was hard for me to see Hackworth’s story as more than a cautionary tale. Like the semi-fictional First Sergeant James in The Hurt Locker, Hack comes across as having been so focused on being good at one, difficult and dangerous thing that it squeezed out the space in his soul for anything else.
Black Hearts, Jim Frederick. The subtitle is “One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness In Iraq’s Triangle of Death” and the book is about what it says on the tin, as the Brits say.
Bravo company, 1/502nd Infantry, assigned to the 101st Airborne’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, spent 2005-6 in a particularly violent area south of Baghdad, Iraq. The unit was already having a bad war, when in March of 2006, four of its members raped a young Iraqi girl and murdered her and her family.
The events that led up to this horrifying crime are a case study in how a team can fall apart in a surprisingly short period of time. There’s no one incident that destroyed the soldiers and their unit. Rather, it was the unchecked build-up of serious stressors over time.
That cumulative toll was significant. From the beginning of their deployment, the soldiers of Bravo were subjected to a toxic mix of intense insurgent violence, constant casualties, a poorly-defined mission, bad living conditions, and most importantly, a nearly absolute lack of effective and engaged leadership.
In one telling passage, B company soldiers show up unshaven at a rear-echelon base for a memorial service for a dead comrade. A staff officer questions their facial scruff. They explain that they didn’t have enough water at their location to both drink and shave. Unfortunately, the officer’s curiosity appeared to be limited to the violation of regulations about appearances--no corrective action, or even further curiosity, about the men’s living conditions was apparently forthcoming.
And that, perhaps, is the secondary tragedy of this event: it was likely avoidable. Whatever his other failings, David Hackworth (see review above) relentlessly emphasized discipline and taking care of one’s people. This does not seem to have been the case with the 101st’s leadership.
The lesson of this for non-military leaders: often, you do need to sweat the small stuff when it comes to your teams’ and employees’ effectiveness and well-being. A clear mission, decent conditions, and engaged leadership go a long way everywhere, not just in a war zone.
The Storm Before The Storm, Mike Duncan. Duncan explores the greed, malfeasance and short-sightedness which created the conditions that led to Julius Ceasar and the birth of the Roman Empire out of the ashes of the centuries-long Republic. (This is in keeping with the general theme of organizational failure in this post.)
Duncan is a compelling writer. His style leavens imbues what could be a stifling recitation of obscure Roman politicians, cities (other than Rome and Carthage, there are very few familiar place names), battlefields, and dates with humor, humanity and clarity. This helps enormously in wading through the centuries-long build up to the Republic’s disintegration.
No prizes for guessing that recognizable themes abound in this book. Populists against elites, economic mismanagement, overextension of the military in endless foreign wars all ring a strong bell--as they’re probably intended to.
However, the strongest and most alarming parallel is one of the most subtle. Duncan discusses the erosion (indeed, the shredding) of mos maiorum. This was the long-established unwritten code of behavior, based in precedent and culture that collectively provided an important set of guardrails or bumpers moderating political and social behavior.
Duncan demonstrates clearly how, once these were breached, it became harder and harder to moderate the forces threatening to tear the Roman Republic apart. No one violation of the unwritten code was fatal; rather it was the accumulated erosion of institutions and expectations that laid the ground for the civil wars that fatally weakened and did in the old regime.
This is a point to ponder today. Duncan has done us a service with this clear and approachable book, and it’s a bracing, and needed, cautionary tale in dark and uncertain times.