Military Times has posted a list of the 16 best military books of the decade. Regrettably, I can only say that I’ve read two-and-a-half of them. The first is The Unforgiving Minute, by my classmate and friend Craig Mullaney, which made the NYT bestseller list. Since I have a small cameo in the book, I must agree that it’s a superb work in all regards.
The half book I read is One Bullet Away, by Nate Fick. Not a lot of Ivy League grads become combat Marines. Right now, I’m at the part where Fick is on the road to Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.
Finally, there’s Fiasco by Tom Ricks. Not sure I’m on board with that one. The first hundred pages of the book are a bizarre account of the build up to the invasion of Iraq, in which Ricks presents the war mostly as Paul Wolfowitz’s brainchild. Even Cheney and Rumsfeld don’t seem to be responsible, let alone Bush or all the Democratic senators who voted for the war.
But the heart of Fiasco is about everything that went wrong in Iraq. I found that part to be a lot more reasonable. But if this is one of the great military books of the decade, why did Ricks completely miss the deep vulnerability of the Al Qaeda-led insurgency? There’s a limit to how much you can beat up on someone for not predicting the future, but if you read Fiasco, you won’t get the sense that Iraq could ever be anything but.