This Man's Army: A Soldier's Story from the Frontlines of the War on Terrorism

From Publishers Weekly
The American war in Afghanistan has been overshadowed by the war in Iraq. But since October 2001, American soldiers have been fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan under often brutal guerrilla war conditions. The author of this war memoir, an active-day army officer, has had his identity embargoed until the book's publication. The book is a fast-paced, first-person look at the war through the educated eyes of a 25-year-old Ivy Leagueâ€"schooled Army Ranger who fought with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan in 2002 (and also in Iraq). The narrative, which confines its battle sequences to Afghanistan and contains a fair amount of reconstructed dialogue, follows the standard war memoir formula. It opens in the battlefield, then flashes back to a chronological rendering of the author's life, including the required depiction of the rigors of military training, complete with bellowing, sadistic drill instructors. Then comes the author's overseas deployment, beginning with a hurry-up-and-wait stint doing "long and boring" convoy escort work in Kuwait. X doesn't arrive in Afghanistan until nearly the exact half-way point of this not-long book. The narrative ends with his homecoming, his readjustment difficulties and his thoughts on the institution of war and the burdens of those who fight in wars. Along the way X provides an often perceptive, informed look at what it's like to be in today's military, as well as the experience of combat in southwest Asia. X also puts his education (a double major, English and Classics, he informs us) to good use, sprinkling references to Shakespeare, Graham Greene, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Joseph Heller and Reinhold Niebuhr, among others, throughout the narrative.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
When the history of the current troubles is written, it will be built from the memories of people like U.S. Army Lt. Andrew Exum. His trooper's-eye view of the Afghan war is not the story of the biggest battle or the greatest victory, but it nevertheless is a lively account of the fight to wrest high plains territory from the Taliban. More of Exum's soldiers succumbed to altitude sickness or post-combat stress than to enemy bullets. His platoon of the 10th Mountain Division spent more time waiting for action at Camp Doha in Kuwait than deployed in the field in Afghanistan. Despite the sporadic nature of the conflict, platoon commander Exum brought his men to such a high standard that they became the top-rated unit in the battalion, and his company was regarded as the best in the brigade. These achievements lend credibility to his narrative. Exum followed a somewhat unusual path to military service. Born in Tennessee, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) to help pay his tuition, eventually becoming cadet commander of his ROTC class. Lt. Exum went through several phases of Army training after college and was eventually assigned to the 10th Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., from where his unit was sent to the Middle East.Perhaps befitting a man with his educational background, he has studded his book with literary and philosophical references, including Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Walker Percy, Somerset Maugham, Jorge Luis Borges, Immanuel Kant and Reinhold Niebuhr. Exum picked up Kant to read during off-duty hours in training (though he gave up on Critique of Pure Reason after 50 pages). The scene in which he tells a fellow trainee, a Navy Seal, that Nabokov's Lolita is about the road trip of a man and his stepdaughter, and then agrees that the book is boring, is quite amusing. Television and movie references also abound. In Kuwait he calls his Humvee "The General Lee" after the car in the TV show "The Dukes of Hazzard." This Man's Army is also replete with accounts of athletic feats, such as Exum's performing pull-ups after climbing to the top of a derelict 100-plus foot satellite dish in Kuwait. Although less discussion of physical fitness and more commentary on actual events would have been useful, he recounts his troops' exploits at sufficient length to show what the daily campaign was like for American soldiers -- including the cruel hazing of new recruits, because "that's what happens when you give infantrymen a bullshit mission and bore them to death for weeks." Exum's unit was among the first to deploy to Kuwait, less than a month after Sept. 11 and a few days before the United States began bombing Afghanistan. They then cooled their heels at Camp Doha until March 2002, five and a half months later. "Operation Anaconda" finally brought Exum's platoon to Afghanistan, where other elements of the 10th Mountain Division sustained serious losses when U.S.-allied Afghan troops bobbled their mission, and Taliban and Al Qaeda forces proved too much to handle for the Americans of the 101st Airborne Division. Exum saw Afghanistan as the Wild West and Bagram Airbase, where he was stationed, as "the equivalent of an old cavalry post." His platoon went on missions to recover sensitive equipment, destroy enemy caches and participate in the main combat action. His exertions were such that he lost 20 pounds in the month his platoon spent in Afghanistan. He also endured a shocking baptism by fire when he killed an enemy soldier who, in his American clothes, at first glance "looked more like a Vail ski bum than a terrorist." Briefly panicked, Exum wondered, "What if I had just killed an American soldier? Some Special Forces operator or CIA agent operating deep behind enemy lines in civilian clothes?" An examination of the corpse put his fears to rest. Unlike U.S. soldiers in Iraq, many of whom have faced year-long tours and extensions, Exum's platoon returned to the United States after little more than six months abroad. Forces of the 10th Division went back to Afghanistan later, minus Exum, who had been reassigned to lead a Ranger unit. His military career was cut short by a serious knee injury suffered, ironically, when he was playing street hockey with buddies on base after his unit had returned from Afghanistan. "In the end there is one thing I am sure of," he concludes. "No matter a war's outcome the soldier never wins. . . . After the shooting stops, how does the soldier settle back into society and modern civilization?" In Exum's case, perhaps by writing a book as worthy and uncommonly powerful as this one. Reviewed by John PradosCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
The young Tennesseean who wrote this fine account of the post-9/11 army admits to a southern military heritage. This led him to go to college through the ROTC and on to the grueling Ranger School. His accounts of both are among the best during the last generation, but his military and literary achievements don't stop there. In command of a platoon of the 31st Infantry, he and other light infantry units were brusquely dispatched to the Middle East. He learned a good deal about himself and his men while pulling security duty in Kuwait, then still more when conducting sweep operations against the remnants of the Taliban in Afghanistan, where he killed a man and learned more than he ever wanted to know about the questions others will ask on the subject. Soldier X will be leaving the army with a disabling injury--one hopes for a literary career as distinguished as any military one that circumstance has denied him. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
This Man’s Army follows one extraordinary young man’s transformation from Ivy League student to twenty-first-century warrior. Soldier X vividly brings to life his journey through ROTC training, the grueling trials of the elite Ranger School, and into the treacherous terrain of the Shah-e-Kot Valley in Afghanistan. There he leads his men to root out the hardcore remnants of Osama bin Laden’s forces, and must confront and kill an Al Qaeda fighter. On his return to the United States, Soldier X must face how media coverage has distorted public perception of the war back home as he seeks to make peace with the man he had become. In the tradition of Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, This Man’s Army is a gripping story of a young man’s introduction to the horrors of war, reported with brutal honesty and compelling insight. By turns harrowing and inspiring, it is the first account of combat from a new generation that is rising to confront the grave threat that faces our civilization and our way of life.

About the Author
Born and raised in Tennessee, twenty-five-year-old Soldier X graduated from an Ivy League university in 2000 and holds the rank of captain. A veteran of Operation Anaconda, he currently serves with the U.S. Army Rangers.


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A consistently engaging kill-and-tell tale of life in olive drab. "Soldier X"-his name, the publisher promises, will be revealed when the book is published-is not your typical warrior, surely not the "uneducated automaton" that one young hotshot reporter from Newsweek apparently took him to be out in the mountains of Afghanistan. Soldier X reads Kant and Jorge Luis Borges: "Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished," the Argentine writer observed, and Soldier X rejoins, vis-a-vis an atrocious enterprise of his own, "I resolved to view my own acts as inevitable. That man, I reasoned, was dead long before I stepped foot into the valley, and I was a killer long before I pumped four rounds into his torso." He writes to an old classics professor that reading the ancient Greeks prepared him for killing, and for the prospect of his own death. And he thoughtfully explains, for readers who have not known combat, how cold and miserable and just plain frightening it can be: on every page, it seems, some soldier is vomiting in terror at the thought of what's to come-and that's just in training for the actual fighting, for a good chunk of Soldier X's memoir describes his sentimental education as an Army Ranger, undergoing a program of instruction that, he was told, "physically took about seven years off your life." Soldier X delivers sharply observed scenes from fighting on the ever-fluid front lines of Afghanistan, where he went to bloody the ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaeda-which in turn did a solid job of bloodying the Americans. He also offers learned commentary on various aspects of the modern soldier's life, from post-traumatic stressdisorder to the dislocating experience of being on the battlefield one day and in a shopping mall back home the next. ("When the kid at the movie theater box office made me wait for five minutes while he talked on the phone, I wanted to rip his trachea out.") Top-notch. Deserving of a place alongside Michael Herr's Dispatches, Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, and other classic or soon-to-be-so tales of modern war. Agent: Daniel Greenberg


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