Somalia on Five Dollars a Day

From Publishers Weekly
A career army officer and a Gulf War vet, Stanton was familiar with combat pay, that extra something given to soldiers when facing "hostile fire or imminent danger" (currently $150 a month, or about $5 a day), when he sat on the roof of his Saudi Arabian headquarters in 1992 and read the "pink slip" that made him battalion operations officer of Task Force 2-87 infantry, 10th Mountain Division. By February 1993, his group was the first in Kismayu, beginning on the "squalid and puzzling little failure" that Operation Restore Hope turned out to be. Such sophisticated and contextualized observations are rife in this field memoir, one of the few to come out of the conflict and certainly in a class by itself in terms of the quality of the writing. Few army memoirs contain the solid, synthetic historical and day-to-day background to the conflict that Stanton includes throughout, and even fewer contain sentences like "It was quite a sight to see the tall, dignified [Ambassador Robert] Oakley, who towered over most of the elders, speaking to the old Somali men who sat uncomfortably on their chairs, with their carved, inlaid walking sticks beside them." Most of the book concerns firsthand observations of quotidian operations and analyses of what went wrong and why, which will limit its appeal, but it is certainly one of the finest books of its kind for the season. (July)Forecast: As a Military Book Club selection and with a $75,000 promotion budget and radio tour "of the top 25 markets" behind it, this book will find its readership. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The era of the "citizen soldier" is clearly over; today's military has many roles and must perform them impeccably. In late 1992, as the UN intervention in Somalia to provide relief supplies lost its grip, units of the 10th Mountain Division were ordered by a lame-duck President Bush into the Kismayu and Afgoi areas, where they disarmed feuding tribesmen, accompanied relief supply convoys, negotiated with local leaders, and at times found themselves drawn into armed rioting. In one of the most vivid, informing, and intelligent descriptions of the modern military experience yet written, Colonel Stanton (battalion operations officer, Task Force 2-87 infantry, 10th Mountain Division) describes this mission and the military training and planning that preceded it including a side trip to Florida to keep order and distribute aid after Hurricane Andrew in July 1992. His candor and thoroughness extend right down to the personalities of the men under and above him. If you need to know the details about Operations Other Than War, current MOUT details, OPLANs and PORDs, and much more, this is a valuable and entertaining work. Mel D. Lane, Sacramento, CA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
A sort of unofficial prequel to Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (1999), this eye-opening chronicle of Operation Restore Hope lets us see the turmoil of Somalia through a soldier's eyes. Restore Hope was a failed peacekeeping operation: U.S. troops (including Stanton) were sent to Somalia in the early 1990s to "save the starving" but were forced to withdraw not quite a year and a half later. What turned a peacekeeping mission into a disaster? There is no simple answer, but Stanton cuts through a lot of the confusion and gives us some idea of what went on there. Too many books of this kind describe events from the commanders' points of view, well removed from the down-and-dirty goingson. Stanton, on the other hand, shows us the front lines: we see the poverty, the destruction, and the death close-up and personal. We may have only a slightly better understanding of why Restore Hope went wrong, but at least we now know what it must have felt like to be there while it failed. For fans of military nonfiction, this is a mustread. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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The era of the "citizen soldier" is clearly over; today's military has many roles and must perform them impeccably. In late 1992, as the UN intervention in Somalia to provide relief supplies lost its grip, units of the 10th Mountain Division were ordered by a lame-duck President Bush into the Kismayu and Afgoi areas, where they disarmed feuding tribesmen, accompanied relief supply convoys, negotiated with local leaders, and at times found themselves drawn into armed rioting. In one of the most vivid, informing, and intelligent descriptions of the modern military experience yet written, Colonel Stanton (battalion operations officer, Task Force 2-87 infantry, 10th Mountain Division) describes this mission and the military training and planning that preceded it including a side trip to Florida to keep order and distribute aid after Hurricane Andrew in July 1992. His candor and thoroughness extend right down to the personalities of the men under and above him. If you need to know the details about Operations Other Than War, current MOUT details, OPLANs and PORDs, and much more, this is a valuable and entertaining work. Mel D. Lane, Sacramento, CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.


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