Taliban: The Unknown Enemy
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May 29th, 2011
Two Wars by Nate Self
Cover via Amazon
Despite my history background, I am not one to read a lot of military history or focus on wars from the perspective of soldiers. My focus in graduate school was intellectual and diplomatic history. And when I read history now it is rarely focused on the military.
Two things prompted me to read Two Wars: One Hero’s Fight on Two Fronts–Abroad and Within by Nate Self: 1) it was available for free on the Kindle for a period of time and 2) once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down.
It was just one of those stories that grabs you and holds you until you finish. And what it does is give you a first person account of what it is like to train to be a solider, fight in far off places, even return a hero only to struggle with a psychological challenge that is as great a threat as any war or battle.
Here is the publishers descpription:
Former army ranger Nate Self, a hero from the Robert’s Ridge rescue in Afghanistan, tells his whole story—from the pulse-pounding battle in the mountains of Afghanistan to the high-stakes battle he has waged against post traumatic stress disorder. This book will become a go-to book for understanding the long-term effects of the war on terror. Thousands of families are fighting this battle, and Nate opens up his life—including his successes, tragedies, struggles with thoughts of suicide—to show how his faith and his family pulled him through.
I found the writing to be very well done. Self tells the story of how he was drawn to the military, how his career developed, the challenges and rewards of life in the army, all as a backdrop to that life changing battle on the mountain.
But the second half of the book is equally well done. The style changes but the simple and effective descriptions still tell a powerful story – this time about how he struggled to return to “normal” life and how it almost took his marriage and his life.
All of this as a faithful Christian seeking to serve God in every facet of his life. The result is a unique insight into the mind and experiences of a solider fighting on the front lines of the war on terror.
December 29th, 2010
Into the Viper’s Nest by Stephen Grey
Similar to Iraq, I am not sure where our country is headed in Afghanistan. The country seems to be composed of tribes that shift their allegiances depending on the circumstances. Our efforts (going on ten years) sometimes seem to be working, but then at other times, we seem to be running in circles. We have a few successes that are marred by a few defeats (political and military) – the country’s progress is one big blob of mediocrity. Stephen Grey writes about the Battle of Musa Qala in his book entitled Into the Viper’s Nest: The First Pivotal Battle of the Afghan War. The December 2007 battle could be considered a microcosm of the whole conflict.
Musa Qala is a village located in one of Afghanistan’s more contentious provinces – Helmand. This province is key to the opium trade – its fields represent a significant percentage of the world’s opium production. As a result, it is an agricultural gold mine for whoever controls it – even the Taliban with their hard stance against drugs (they use the proceeds from the opium sales to fund their operations). The Afghan government does not openly support the growing of poppies, but corrupt government officials allow it in exchange for kickbacks.
Grey divides the book into several parts: The Rebellion; The Population is the Prize; The Taliban Strikes Back; The Plan; The Battle; and The Aftermath. The book is 308 pages, including an appendix listing the names of all those killed in Helmand Province from September 17, 2007 to March 31, 2008. Grey also includes seventeen black and white photographs (I think these were added to give the reader some visual context because most of them are not of the fighting during the time period covered in the book and I do not think any of them are of the combatants mentioned in the text).I like Grey’s background on the situation in Helmand – how the Taliban were beaten, but then allowed to creep back in because various missteps by NATO and the Afghan government. Grey paints a pretty bleak picture of the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai. Many of the officials in the province are corrupt and put their interests before the interests of the people. In addition, many of the NATO forces have blundered by obliterating civilians’ homes without a care. It also took NATO officers long time to embrace the ink blot strategy of counterinsurgency warfare rather than moving from location to location fighting the Taliban.
I think that Grey could have expanded the part on the battle – it is about 120 pages of the 308 pages. Because there were a number of different British and American units involved in the battle, it gets a little confusing trying to remember each of the unit’s objectives and the personnel who belong to each respective unit. The confusion may have been mitigated by placing the maps amongst the text rather than at the end of the book.
Despite some of the confusion in the text, I think this is an excellent book describing the situation in Afghanistan from the macro and the micro level.
