Product Description

During the past two decades, the aims and the nature of war have changed completely. Today, American soldiers on the ground typically operate in small, self-contained units with well-defined goals that require a high degree of training and risk. This book offers a look at the realities of that warfare, and the lives and deaths of the soldiers who fight it. American Soldier draws upon the extensive literature that has emerged in recent years describing episodes of warfare in places ranging from Somalia, Haiti, and Colombia to Afghanistan and Iraq. Mark Bowden in Black Hawk Down gives a gripping blow-by-blow account of action on the ground in Somalia while Martin Stanton, an officer in the first U.S. army unit to arrive, describes the army’s "squalid and puzzling little failure" in Somalia on Five Dollars a Day. CIA agent Robert Baer tells of his twenty-plus years in counter-terrorist espionage in the Middle East in See No Evil, Peter Maas reports from Bosnia on the insanity of modern war in Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, and Air Force pilot Scott O’Grady describes the terror of being shot down in Bosnia.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1030655 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 364 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In an age of laser bombs and pilotless drones, intimate contact with battle is increasingly the province of elite commandos; this collection of journalism, memoir and fiction about Green Berets and Navy SEALS charts their combat experiences. The material is in reverse chronological order, starting with Robert Pelton's gung-ho account of Green Berets calling in air strikes on the Taliban. The mood darkens with an excerpt from Mark Bowden's report on the disastrous Mogadishu battle, Black Hawk Down, and a look at the torpor of peacekeeping in Haiti from Tracy Kidder. Philip Taubman writes of Green Berets carrying out assassinations and training terrorists in the course of America's clandestine dirty wars of the '70s and '80s. A number of pieces revisit the brutality and moral chaos of Vietnam, including Jeff Stein's noirish account of the murder of a Viet Cong agent and Tim O'Brien's surreal tale of an Ohio high school girl who leads a Green Beret unit into the heart of darkness. Although occasionally marred by soldier-of-fortune braggadocio and sentimentalized scenes of warriors communing with the souls of men they have killed, the selections here are well written and gripping. 16 b&w photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Untruth in Advertising
The subtitle of this book is "Stories of Special Forces from Iraq to Afghanistan." Why then, is over half the book taken from the Vietnam conflict? And one of the stories is by that foul-mouthed self-promoting braggart, Richard Marcenko, a name that makes real navy seals wince in embarassment.

There is not one original story in the entire book, and it's the only book I've ever purchased only to realize that I'd read it already. Each article is some re-hashed part of another book that most SF fans will have already read.

Very disappointing.

A very good read -
The first 3/4 of this book are 5-star, but it slips a bit toward the end when it dredges up Vietnam stories (one of which is fiction). Couple things to realize - first, it's not 368 pages - it's under 300. Second - it's not the stuff they advertise. Blow up the cover photo above to see what's really in there. No Peter Maas, no Stanton in Somalia, no Baer of the CIA and no Scott O'Grady, who wouldn't have belonged anyway, not being Special Forces. You get a really good article on SF in Afghanistan, a thrilling story from Desert Storm, an interesting story from Honduras, a couple of riveting reads from Haiti, and of course a chunk of Black Hawk down. But by page 172 you're back in Vietnam reading tired stuff you've seen before. It's worth buying for the first 172 pages, but given the subtitle, I wish Mr. Hardcastle had included some of what was advertised instead of the Vietnam stuff. Still and all, you won't put it down once you start - it's a two-day read and you'll enjoy it.

Rename this book
Only a couple of the stories were from Iraq and Afghanistan. Rename the book to "Mostly Vietnam Stories with a Few Current Ones and Some from the Gulf War" and it would automatically be more correct.