Zin's Spin; War May Be Hell, but Boots On the Ground Serves As a Ringing Endorsement

Summary

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With the death toll for American forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom now surpassing the losses accrued before President George W. Bush declared the conflict over, an I-was-there account of the heroics of U.S. troops seems almost premature. Karl Zinsmeister's Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq (Truman Talley/St. Martin's Press, New York City; 213 pages; $24.95/hardcover) was published in September 2003, when there was more optimism that the death toll would stop climbing. While the brief and inconclusive voyeuristic journey behind the front lines is exciting and revealing at times, Zinsmeister taints those moments with bitter snarling at his ideological enemies.

While he makes it perfectly clear that he remains deeply moved by his experience in Iraq, in the end it's difficult for the reader to feel the same way because of Zinsmeister's lack of narrative depth. In frenetic prose he outlines shadows of lionhearted men's men who are strong both under their shirts and in their convictions. But they wind up being faceless archetypal snapshots that, by the end of the book, seem like forgotten acquaintances. Of course, the work is nonfiction and perhaps the realities of being an embedded reporter prevented Zinsmeister from following one soldier or one narrative thread throughout his stay in the Iraqi desert.

Zinsmeister's several snipes at Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times war reporter Chris Hedges come off as bitter and surprisingly uneducated for a Yale grad, and they suggest the author may have been so deeply embedded that he now can't separate himself from the blind loyalty to the commander-in-chief shared by the 82nd Airborne. Pick this title up for a brief but solid account of one troop's first footsteps in the war. If you want the poorly thought-out and spiteful diatribes against anyone questioning the war that bookend this text, they're available for free on the AM radio dial every day.

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Zin's Spin; War May Be Hell, but Boots On the Ground Serves As a Ringing Endorsement

With the death toll for American forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom now surpassing the losses accrued before President George W. Bush declared the conflict over, an I-was-there account of the heroics of U.S. troops seems almost premature. Karl Zinsmeister's Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82...

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