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Reviews from GoodReads

Outstanding. A book that needed to be written and was written well.

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Personal journal of a company commander in Iraq from 2003-2004. Full of fighting, heat and “Groundhog Days.” (Days like the movie where you wake up and do the exact same thing over and over again.)

Why I started this book: Downloaded the RBDigital App and this book before our library training.

Why I finished it: Compelling narrative. I binged it in under 24 hours. So interesting to read a first hand account from the very beginning of the Iraq War.

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Brown captures both the chaos and the mundanity of modern-day conflict in the Middle East. With a great sense of humour and generally good moral judgement, his journal tells a very vivid and engaging story of a bunch of guys over the other side of the world, fighting a people they will never understand. Often, it was refreshingly “un-PC”. He doesn’t hold back in expressing his disgust at the practices of particularly the Iraqi male renegades. Nor does he keep to himself, his disagreement with the whole “hearts and mind” argument in rebuilding the country. “The only thing these people understand is violence,” he continues to assert.

All round, this provided an unapologetically honest look into the U.S. forces fighting in the Middle East. Knowing how much has changed since then, how much even the necessity of that invasion in the first place has been called entirely into question, makes the book all the more dramatically ironic.

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My son (Army ROTC) may be in Battleground Afghanistan in a few years. Captain Brown’s obsession with cleanliness, physical training, field practice, and what’s for dinner were instructive. His frank observations about the impact of a democratic military on a tribal society were informative. The losses he and his unit suffered in one year were eye-opening. His diary is my introduction to 21st century war, a see-saw between the boring “groundhog days” of laying about and the terror-anger-controlled violence of being hunted, hunting and killing–and then having diplomatic teas with the population that has come to respect you through fear. I can only hope that my son will negotiate the confusions, conundrums and disparities of war with as sane an eye as Captain Brown’s.

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The seemingly inexhaustible use of military lingo, the wisdom clearly earned in combat, the efforts to make inroads with Iraqis, and the enduring humor despite the tragic costs of war all combine impressively upon the reader. One does get a sense of the shaping of the mind of a military commander.

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Clear and disturbing insight into the realities of Iraq in 2004. Makes you reflect on how tragically mismatched the tools, training and tasking where to the mission of speed-dialling a tribal based dictatorship of the 19th century into an open Western-style democracy.