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Review to Review
Jun. 27th, 2012 11:51 amHey,
So I purchased and read all of House to House by David Bellavia yesterday. So I suppose it wins points for being an engrossing book.
Mr. Bellavia was a Sergeant in the US Army who lead a squad of men in the assault on Fallujah in Iraq. The book is his personal recollections of the fight. He takes pride in the fact that he confronts the horrors of war every day and gets the job done. He's conflicted by some of the things that his job requires, but if it means saving his men, that's what he does.
I suppose it might be easy to paint Bellavia as either a True American Patriot or as Macho Jerk With A Gun, but the reason I like these books is because they help us understand what it is we're asking of our soldiers when we send them into combat. War strips a person's psyche back to its most primitive levels. It's not pretty, but it allows them to survive and get the job done. If we send someone to fight, we need them to be monsters to win and they need to be monsters to survive. I'm not saying there's never a reason to go and fight, but there's a price we pay and books like this give us a better accounting of the butcher's bill.
The book is intensely personal. There's very little "big picture" stuff about how the campaign in Fallujah developed, why we were there (again), how the campaign progressed. For Bellavia, it was just another deployment, another job and he only talks about what happened to him and around him. It wasn't even very deep in terms of tactics employed. So that may be frustrating for some readers. But as a personal account it's pretty gripping.
later
Tom
So I purchased and read all of House to House by David Bellavia yesterday. So I suppose it wins points for being an engrossing book.
Mr. Bellavia was a Sergeant in the US Army who lead a squad of men in the assault on Fallujah in Iraq. The book is his personal recollections of the fight. He takes pride in the fact that he confronts the horrors of war every day and gets the job done. He's conflicted by some of the things that his job requires, but if it means saving his men, that's what he does.
I suppose it might be easy to paint Bellavia as either a True American Patriot or as Macho Jerk With A Gun, but the reason I like these books is because they help us understand what it is we're asking of our soldiers when we send them into combat. War strips a person's psyche back to its most primitive levels. It's not pretty, but it allows them to survive and get the job done. If we send someone to fight, we need them to be monsters to win and they need to be monsters to survive. I'm not saying there's never a reason to go and fight, but there's a price we pay and books like this give us a better accounting of the butcher's bill.
The book is intensely personal. There's very little "big picture" stuff about how the campaign in Fallujah developed, why we were there (again), how the campaign progressed. For Bellavia, it was just another deployment, another job and he only talks about what happened to him and around him. It wasn't even very deep in terms of tactics employed. So that may be frustrating for some readers. But as a personal account it's pretty gripping.
later
Tom
