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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Really quite poor, poorly written, excitable and callous, 19 Feb 2004
By A Customer
This book claims the cover the entire Afghan campaign; in fact it mainly focuses on the US Green Berets' efforts in the country to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and also the menace of Al Qaeda. This in itself is no bad thing, except that it leaves gaping holes in its coverage of this war (e.g. there is little mention of the Ranger raid on the 20th of October 2001, and very little mention at all of the US Marines' establishment of Camp Rhino in the south of the country), so this is a far from complete history of the campaign.It is also very simply written and ridiculously pro-American and patriotic, which just tars everything with an overly simplistic and one-sided view of events. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are portrayed as evil (which they most undoutedly were) but there is no mention of Northern Alliance atrocities to balance this out; he throws body counts at us and shows he clearly revels in all this death and explosions; and shows the American soldiers as cowboy-like adventurers. There is little to no mention of the horrors of war, or the profound affect it must have on a country to be ravaged by 23 years of continuous, battling war. This is just a study of the 'cool' ways in which you can blow up 'bad guys'; it's made far too simple and far too callous to be a good read. He also never stops to think of the Afghans dying beneath the American bombs, and regards their lives as ridiculously cheap, while emphasizing the importance of American life as if it is worth a million times more than an Afghan's; this, to me, made it unpleasant to read at times. The book also gets awfully repetitive; he recounts the exploits of every Green Beret A-Team on the ground, but all they seem to do is find a good position to spy on the Taliban or Al Qaeda positions from, point a laser designator at the enemy's trenches and call in bombs from American aircraft. Very, very rarely did the Green Berets just shoot people; blowing them up from afar was more efficient, apparently. In fact, the best bits of the book for me were recounting the exploits of the British SAS; they actually got involved in several huge straight firefights with the enemy and came off best each time, and this breaks up the monotony of hearing about B52s drop bombs on people from 40,000 feet continuously. This book is, to say the least, not very good. It has one advantage; that it is factually accurate (as far as I can tell). But to get at the facts you have to read through prose that feels like it was put to page by a teenager, ridiculous patriotism (I believe books like this should be slightly more two-sided, no matter how justified the cause), and also a plot-line of sorts running through the book about a man called 'Jack' which is never explained. Also, do not buy this unless you already have a relatively strong knowledge of military matters and, even better, on the War on Terror and especially the Afghan component, because otherwise this book will leave you both mystified and bored (or rather, more so than if you do know what you're talking about).
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by Malcolm MacPherson
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