The Good Soldiers
Where to buy The Excellent Soldiers books online?
- ISBN13: 9780374165734
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will question why this effort will make it when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among persons listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they chose the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and nearly every grueling step of the way.
What was the right tale of the surge? And was it really a success? Persons are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Excellent Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the tale of these excellent soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale—not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time. Amazon.com Review
Book Description It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it “the surge.” “Many listening tonight will question why this effort will make it when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among persons listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they chose the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad nearly every grueling step of the way.
What was the right tale of the surge? Was it really a success? Persons are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Excellent Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the tale of these excellent soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale–not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.
Faces of the Surge
Beneath every policy choice made in the highest echelons of Washington about how a war should be fought are soldiers who live with persons decisions every day. These are some of the faces of the U.S. strategy known as “the surge,” as photographed by David Finkel, leader of The Excellent Soldiers.
Soldiers of the 2-16 Rangers wait | 
Two soldiers try to collect themselves after |
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Sergeant Adam Schumann, regarded as | |
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If you reflect Finkel’s book is excellent then you should read Black Hearts by TIME’s Jim Frederick out in February, 2010. (I read an early copy and have just pre-ordered a couple.) No offence to Mr. Finkel who has written a excellent book which I am reading now but Black Hearts, in my opinion, is in a different league. Persons who rave about GS will be even more impressed by Black Hearts. It’s the most extraordinary work of nonfiction. Jim Frederick tells the tale of the entire deployment of a group of soldiers in the Triangle of Death who suffered the most terrible losses and were under attack nearly every day. They lived outside the wire in “the most treacherous place at the most treacherous time” in Iraq. Black Hearts is not just for persons who like war books, it’s a book for anyone who wants to read about characters, about human character, how it is tested, about how war really is (some passages are hard to read, so raw and real), how humans interact, how they behave under the kind of pressure most of us will never have to suffer. This book is for anyone who wants to read a perfectly crafted tale, sensitively and honestly handled. You feel as if you were there, watching the soldiers the whole time, willing them to step back two inches, a step that would spare the insurgent a clean shot; urging leaders to choose this course of action, not the one that results in yet more losses, with small overall gain; urging persons who finished up committing the worst crimes of the war to hold back, to dig deeper, fine the excellent in their character, to spare the innocent Iraqis their lives, their brothers-in-arms the ineveitable tainted-by-association. Black Hearts is about leadership, about friendship, about the extraordinary tests on the character of a person, why persons who suffer the same things cope, or don’t. It’s about why some people choose to behave the way they do. (The chapter on the rape of the girl and murder of her family tree by 4 soldiers –all now in gaol in the US — is extremely hard to stomach.) There’s nothing Hollywood — though it would make the most incredible movie really — or sanitized about Black Hearts, so real are the characters and images conveyed. We need to know this is what war is lacking, thankfully, not debating the been-there-done-that pros and cons of going into this particular war. This is the best and most emotive book, not just war book but book, I have read in years. Some scenes made me weep openly. It has changed the way I reflect about men at war, about character, excellent and terrible, right and incorrect, how not every leader is a excellent one, not every soldier is a hero — a point Frederick makes very well — mostly because soldiers and leaders are human, too. But it also makes you realize how our army needs to sort persons who can lead from persons who obviously cannot, that is persons whose errors in judgment have catastrophic consequences, persons whose orders choose whether people live or die and, for persons that live, how they live, how they cope, how they work within the larger group, how they rebuild their lives outside the wire, inside, if they’re lucky enough, and how they deal when they return home. This is stuff we need to know and reflect about. It would be an incredible book were it fiction. The fact it is not makes it all the more riveting and shocking. Frederick is an extremely talented writer and has dug deep. I absolutely recommend Black Hearts to all Amazon customers.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Major disappointment-I so looked forwards to the book, but my anticipation came crashing down.
Sadly, Finkel learned some basic writing techniques in junior high school, which he now beats to death over and over and over and over (irony proposed).
Examples (the book is laced with them-my comments underlined)
He learned to say habibi…
He learned to say shaku…
He learned to (three more follow)..
five sixteen pm
glass bending
five seventeen
bending
five eighteen
beending
five nineteen
boom (I kid you not)
Rustamiyah to the Baghdad airport.
Baghdad to Kuwait.
Kuwait to Budapest (it goes on)
This place.
The F%^^ing dust
The fu^&%ing stink
The fuc7&^%ing all of it. (goes on)
The book is rife with them, page after page–and the book, although I know it is meant to show the monotony of war, is well monotonous.
Try Ambush Alley or Not a excellent day to die for impressive reading. I am stunned by the additional reviewers opinions–stunned. Did I say stunned?
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Book lacks drama or passion. It keeps repeating injuries and deaths that are sustained as a result of explosions caused by IEDs, over and over again. The problem is that it is told from the perspective of a high level commander and not a name closer to the action. It doesn’t even get into military strategies except in a broad sense. Disappointing.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Abraham Lincoln once said, “if you look for the terrible in people, you will find it.” I got this book because I wanted to learn about the Surge and what made it successful. (It was successful) If you want analysis and insight into this battle, save your money. This book is a selective diary about a Ranger brigade’s 15 months in Iraq and their misadventures. I say selective in that it will skip a couple of months and then go into exhausting detail about the tragedies of certain soldiers on a certain day. The pattern is relentless; the soldiers try to do right but everything goes incorrect. People die. People get wounded. They kill the incorrect people and the terrible guys get away. It is incredibly depressing.
Finkel’s reporting probably is very accurate and carefully documented, but I question if it is truly a honest analysis of this battle and war in all-purpose. If you compare “Marine at War”Marine at War for example with this book, you will see similar situations and similar suffering on the part of the soldiers involved, but today’s reporter has been steeped in the thought that ALL War is unacceptable and nothing is worth the sacrifice that these men did. Consider the quotations listed in the front of each chapter by President Bush building it appear that everything is fine when in reality nothing is effective. Today’s reporter is so concerned about getting the facts that he fails to convey the motives of the characters.
All bureaucracy’s are SNAFUS. The army is no different. Managers are permanently questioned to keep up morale when they know their campaigns are doomed. The soldiers in this book paid a terrible fee. But their suffering is just as terrible as all soldiers have faced through the centuries. The tactics and the equipment may be different, but the confusion and the pain soldiers suffer is universal.
If you want a book that details all the terrible things that can take place to a soldier in Iraq, this is your book. If you want a book that jutifies your view that this war was senseless, read this book. If you want to know what our soldiers learned in their struggle to carry the fight to the enemy, don’t buy this book. If you want to know why the enemy was fighting our men, read something else. And finally, if you want a pleased ending which shows how our forces brought peace to all the warring factions and returned Iraq from the brink of chaos, certainly, this book is not for you!
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Thus David Finkel quotes a soldier stationed in Baghdad as part of the surge. That soldier goes on to say: “They say on TV that soldiers want to be here? I can’t speak for every soldier….but there ain’t nobody that wants to be here, because there’s no point. What are we getting out of [bleeping] being here? Nothing.”
This is Mr. Finkel’s view of the situation, too, as revealed in this Apocalypse Now-meets Baghdad view of the war, in which the U.S. troops he befriended are largely depicted as grave, murderous, foul-mouthed, beer-swilling, porn-watching, God-loving hicks.
The worst of them all is the evil Kauzlarich, battalion commander, depicted as a mindless fool in way over his head who nevertheless knows how to lie to Congress about the situation: “One leadership lesson he’d absorbed well was the importance of knowing what to place out of a conversation.” His men despise him, of course; as one says, “I don’t ever want to see that mother[bleeper] again.”
Just to be sure we’re getting it, Finkel starts each chapter with a quotation from that boob Bush, showing how out of touch he was with how things really were–in perfect disarray, with having no effect death piled upon having no effect death. Indeed, that’s the whole of the book, relentless death in the service of stupidity.
If that’s your kind of thing, delight in! I establish the book to be 273 pages dedicated to the proposition that war is hell, all described in prose discharge with moral condescension.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5