Favorite Books in 2021

Here are my five favorite books that I read in 2021 and two or three paragraph book reviews about them:The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley by Wesley Morgan

This book is the first complete account of the long war throughout Kunar Province, Afghanistan. The focus is on the Pech River Valley and its tributaries (the Korengal, Watapur, and Waygul valleys). Full disclosure here, I spent fifteen months (give or take) in Kunar Province with one of the units described. This book is an incredible feat of journalism — Morgan took multiple trips to the Pech River valley, embedded with units and and spoke to Pech residents as well. He interviewed everyone he could get his hands on, and this book is the fruits of years of hard labor.The efforts of Americans in the Pech sort of follow a cyclical nature. First, counterterrorism raids brought U.S. forces into the area; then, American commanders brought in conventional forces to stabilize and bring the Afghan government’s influence on the region. It ultimately petered out as that ebbed and flowed — probably peaking at the 2008 Battle of Wanat. Then American conventional units mostly left the area, and it returned to a counterterrorism operation characterized by drone strikes and targeted raids. Some conventional forces made their way back into the valley but only briefly. Morgan traces the story of American involvement up to 2019.In a way, the Pech serves as a perfect microcosm for the futility of the American effort in Afghanistan. This is perhaps the best book on Afghanistan I have read, and has motivated me to pursue my next project on the history of one unit in Kunar. This book should be required reading for every Army leader preparing to take troops anywhere.

Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia by Michael Hankins

An outstanding look at the development and impact of a particular subculture on a broad military organization. Hankins does a brilliant job of describing fighter pilot culture from its origination in the “Knights of the Air” of World War I. He then carries that culture through the development of the F-16 Fighting Falcon and the F-15 Eagle as artifacts of that culture. The two aircraft designs represent competing cultural priorities about air superiority. The two aircraft were, at least initially, designed by engineer and pilot “purists” who wanted a simple and agile aircraft designed to dominate in air-to-air dogfights rather than being used to attack ground targets.Hankins charts the rise of the fighter pilot mafia. These purists, buoyed by their nostalgia, believed the lesson of Vietnam was that the future of air supremacy would require dogfighting specific airframes, only to find their efforts undermined by the reality of U.S. warfighting since. The 1991 Gulf War, for example, featured little aerial combat and many instances of fighter delivered munitions providing profound effects on ground targets. This is an excellent book, one that I could not put it down. I cannot recommend this enough for anyone interested in military cultures, aircraft, the USAF, or the indomitable John Boyd.

There’s Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century by Fiona Hill

I listened to the audiobook version, and Fiona Hill is an excellent writer and narrator. This book describes her experience growing up in the post-industrial coal mining region of Northeast England and her subsequent experience coming to the United States. She then compares the industrial decline of the United States and Great Britain with that of the Soviet Union and finds striking similarities.Hill’s strengths are her ability to link the three countries’ experiences to her own. She is also strong in her depiction of English culture, the reality of accent (read: class) and gender discrimination, and the inherent inequalities in British schooling. All of which were new to me. I also especially enjoyed her insider view of the Trump administration. She describes the former president as someone addicted to flattery, who surrounded himself with yes men (indicated by his incessant “firing” of various admin officials, including the Secretary of Defense, in the lead up to the January 6 insurrection, among many others), and sought to destroy any negative word uttered about him as his idol would have — Vladimir Putin.Unlike the plethora of recent memoirs from his administration and books by Woodward and others that make him the focal point, Trump is not the focus. To Hill, Trump is merely a petulant child narcissist, the symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself. Overall, this is an incredible listen and a great insight into the last administration and her scholarly and anecdotal work on the industrial decline and the rise of populism. The book is scant on details of the impeachment hearing she testified in but is otherwise an excellent memoir by an incredible figure of the last few years.

War Flower: My Life After Iraq by Brook King

This is an excerpt from my soon to be published review in Marine Corps History.Rarely does an Iraq war memoir combine the sort of literary genius, realism, and post-war healing found in Brook King’s War Flower: My Life After Iraq.“Nothing good survives war” (p. 126), or so the author asserts. Still, if this memoir serves as anything — it is a story of survival, perseverance, and an example that something good and beautiful can eventually come from war. King is living proof of that as she describes her trials and tribulations in combat — and perhaps most poignantly — at home.Ultimately this is about the complex reality of life in and after the military for women. She opens by retelling her testimony from the court-martial trial of the father of her unborn twin boys — an army captain — for his relationship with King, an enlisted woman. At the risk of perpetuating problematic stereotypes about women and sex in the combat zone, King draws the reader into her personal story with the depth of her emotional honesty. This book hammers home the complex existence of being a woman in such a hyper-masculinized space as the military.King writes with great pace and suspense. The book alternates between first-person narrative and some creative non-fiction wherein she imagines herself in the lives of Iraqi children she briefly encountered or even as dog tags. According to an April 2019 Wrath Bearing Tree interview with King, this technique reflects her memory — disjointed, fragmented, and often kaleidoscopic. For King’s memoir, the method works well and helps give the reader a sense of her reality.This book should be required reading for those that wish to understand better being young, female, and at war. It stands alongside Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More Than You (2004) as definitive works on the enlisted woman’s perspective in the Global War on Terror. This is not a book for the faint of heart as King is as honest as they come, describing in gory detail the feeling of grasping the charred, maimed, and destroyed flesh of Americans left forever young in Iraq or the Iraqi teenager she shot with her Ma Deuce. War Flower should be read by all — veterans, civilians, and servicemembers alike.

Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990–2003 by Joseph Stieb

This blurb is an excerpt from my previous review, which can be found here.This book is an excellent contribution to the literature of 1990s American political history, and particularly, as the title suggests, how the question of Iraq fit into 1990s American politics. Now don’t get that twisted; this is not a book about the First Gulf War or the invasion of 2003. Nor is there much on CENTCOM operations during the 1990s as the U.S. attempted to “contain” Iraq. No, this is about how nascent ideas about regime change grew from a minority after victory in 1991 to the consensus in the post 9/11 moment as the second Bush administration struggled to “do something” in the wake of such an egregious attack.The Regime Change Consensus is a foreign policy and political history that describes just how the country justified regime change in a country already reeling from sanctions. I find it odd how the first Bush administration fully understood the ramifications of total regime change in terms of American men, matériel, and money. Yet, by the immediate aftermath of 9/11, most of the Federal government (and even Britain) were convinced that Saddam had to go, as there was no other alternative. Stieb’s analysis often makes it seem the best way to avoid the post-2003 catastrophe might have been regime change in 1991, but that might be one of the big “what ifs” of the post-Cold War.