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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good start, more follow-through needed, 21 Nov 2003
Karl Zinsmeister is the first embedded reporter (or "embed") with Coalition forces to write an account of Gulf War II. Zinsmeister spent about a month with various elements of the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. As such, his book will enter the military historiography of the conflict as a second-hand account of the fighting.That said, Boots on the Ground seems to be a collection of various vignettes or articles that Zinsmeister wrote for periodicals back in America. After a background about the international situation, Zinsmeister provides minimal context to the conflict as a whole. That is fine--he was reporting from the tip of the spear, as they say, but far too often Zinsmeister is only a distant observer of events. Unlike Fox News Channel's Greg Kelly, Zinsmeister was not amongst paratroopers during actual combat; he spent a large amount of time at forward arming and refueling points of the 82nd's (air) cavalry squadron. Of course, nowhere in a war zone is totally safe, but a FARP is far more safer than say, riding on the back of a Bradley armored fighting vehicle. Instead of a "month" with the 82nd Airborne, the various tales that Zinsmeister recounts seem more like what a traveller would have wrote had they somehow dropped in on the war for a day or two. This of course is not fair to Zinsmeister's length of stay but that is how the book comes off. Zinsmeister write about how on his flight back to America he raced to type out all the things he had seen. Yet the book he produced is very thin indeed with a large introduction and a closing section that relate to history and future perspective. They say if you want it fast, then quality suffers. Unless Zinsmeister really was not amongst the "boots on the ground," I think he should have waited to flesh out his account.
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