In the Company of Soldiers : A Chronicle of Combat

In the Company of Soldiers : A Chronicle of Combat Rick Atkinson Date: 15 March, 2004   —   $15.75   —   Book product page Rating:

I've been looking for a military history of President Bush's Iraq adventure for a while. John Keegan's book was a big disappointment, so I picked up Atkinson's book when it came out in paperback. Having read a couple of his previous books, "An Army at Dawn" and "Crusade" (I highly recommend both), I had my fingers crossed. It didn't help. "In the Company of Soldiers" would have been more aptly titled, "What I Did on my Summer Vacation".

For what it is, though, it's a riveting tale. Atkinson details his deployment as an embedded journalist with the 101st Airborne Division. His assignment was to shadow its commander, Major General David Petraeus, and that's what we get. From lobster dinners in the officer's mess to MREs full of sand in the desert, Atkinson chronicles the ups and downs of the Screaming Eagle's division headquarters.

Atkinson makes you privy to every instance where he forgot his gas mask and every complaint about the lack of Pop-Tarts by Gen. Petraeus. In between, you get fleeting glimpses of actual combat: There's the time Atkinson heard a shot go by his head, and the time they tried to use laser guided bombs on a Fedayeen stronghold - only to have the bombs lose the laser signal in the dust and detonate too close to our own troops, and the first disastrous Apache attack helicopter raid in which most of the vehicles suffered serious damage from massive volleys of unaimed small arms fire which almost led to a complete ban on further raids.

Seriously, the book is well written and I really enjoyed reading it, but... It's really just a travelogue through the 101st Airborne Division's Iraq. It's good, easy reading on a tough subject. Atkinson quickly covers all the controversial points of the invasion and its immediate aftermath, but leaves you feeling like you don't have the big picture. But I guess - being down at the division level - Atkinson didn't have the big picture himself at the time.

During the campaign, Gen. Petraeus often asked Atkinson, "Tell me how this is going to end." Since then, Gen. Petraeus has been in charge of training Iraqi troops, and I gotta believe - two years later - he's still asking the same question, "How does it end?"