Seeking Peace in Special Operations
The Way of Rōnin: Defying the Odds on Battlefields, in Business and in Life. Tu Lam. Hanover Square Press. 368 pages. $30
By Timothy Heck
The global war on terrorism has brought forth a veritable avalanche of books focused on the exploits of U.S. Special Operations Command troops. From Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan and Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man at the outset of the war, to Dagger 22: U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations in Bala Murghab, Afghanistan, the story of the quiet professional has been particularly well documented.
However, few stories have had the emotional clarity and self-reflection evident in Tu Lam’s The Way of the Rōnin: Defying the Odds on Battlefields, in Business and in Life.
Born in South Vietnam, Lam’s family immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s after surviving both escape from Saigon and life in a refugee camp in Indonesia. After a hardscrabble upbringing in North Carolina, Lam joined the U.S. Army in the early 1990s, working his way through an airborne infantry pipeline and onto a long-range surveillance detachment team in the 82nd Airborne Division. From there, Lam earned his Special Forces tab and was assigned to the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne).
Like other books in the genre, Lam’s spends a not-insignificant amount of time covering the training and preparation required to become a special operations soldier. Unlike many other stories, however, Lam’s includes overt and not-so-overt incidents of racist behavior, language and treatment from his peers and seniors. This added a layer of difficulty atop the mentally and physically challenging training and evaluations.
Central to Lam’s life is Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings. Musashi, a Japanese swordsman, wrote the book in 1643 as both a martial arts instruction manual for his students and as a philosophical primer for life, with emphasis on spirituality, strategy and learning. Throughout the text, Lam uses language and elements of Musashi’s work to explain his thoughts, actions and emotional responses to events.
Lam makes it apparent that The Book of Five Rings was not just a “how-to” manual for a young man, but a framework through which he viewed life. While Lam does explain some elements of Musashi’s central themes, his own book would be strengthened through an expanded section outlining these core tenets. Doing so would allow Lam to better clarify what he means when using Musashi’s language and paradigms.
Unlike most global war on terrorism-related special operations books, Lam’s story is decidedly silent on gunfights, ambushes or raids. This is somewhat unsurprising given his career trajectory and the units to which he was assigned. Instead, Lam uses his global war on terrorism experiences to help explore and lay the groundwork for his post-separation mental health struggles and eventual recovery.
Again using Musashi’s framework to narrate his journey, Lam documents his descent into his “own personal hate maze” that strained his marriage, career and sense of self.
Ultimately, The Way of Rōnin is a touching, well-written, immensely personal story of a young refugee’s journey into some of the Army’s toughest assignments and back out the other side. It is a tale of creation, destruction and redemption.
Lam’s honesty, self-reflection and growth make this an eminently readable memoir of the global war on terrorism.
Timothy Heck is a joint historian with the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint History and Research Office, the Pentagon. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, and deputy editorial director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the co-editor of both volumes of On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare, and co-editor of Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences.
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Diseases Can Devastate Wartime Efforts
Epidemics and the American Military: Five Times Disease Changed the Course of War. Jack McCallum. Naval Institute Press. 288 pages. $36.95
By Maj. Gen. Joseph Caravalho Jr., U.S. Army retired
Author Jack McCallum’s Epidemics and the American Military: Five Times Disease Changed the Course of War is a must-read for military history buffs with a penchant for clinical science. For “bottom-line” readers, McCallum shows how unmitigated infectious diseases are more impactful on combat readiness than combat casualties.
More importantly, preventing or effectively managing devastating epidemics in wartime requires both inspiring leadership and disciplined action.
McCallum eloquently paints a series of American historical vignettes—from the Revolutionary War to World War II—to demonstrate the significant effect that infectious disease outbreaks had on military combat operations. He leverages his unique combination of historical and medical expertise to introduce the reader to each scene’s offending infectious agent—smallpox, typhoid, yellow fever and malaria—in sometimes excruciating detail.
With these scene-setters, McCallum then articulately describes the environmental and battlefield conditions at play, along with vividly depicting key individuals’ personalities and characteristics. His gifted storytelling allows the reader to see how decisions were made—or deferred—that ultimately impacted the course of wartime history.
This book drives home the point that the nature of warfare makes epidemics especially dangerous. Of the disciplined approaches available to the combat commander, placing infected soldiers in quarantine is the most expensive and least effective. Sanitation measures taken to disrupt the offending pathogen’s life cycle (“ecology”) is equally difficult during war. The final two approaches, namely, treatment (“pharmacology”) and vaccines (“immunology”), are the most effective means available. Both provide distinct advantages to the combatant with the will and discipline to fully employ these approaches.
McCallum relays a series of instances when infections ran rampant among unimmunized troops, causing chaos while decimating effective fighting formations. Once causative factors were determined, at least empirically, medical recommendations were either accepted by leadership (during the Revolutionary and Spanish-American wars) or not (in World War I), or proved difficult to execute due to lack of information, misinformation and disinformation (during World War II).
Among the many heroes highlighted in the book, the author acknowledges Gen. George Washington for ordering the first wartime immunization of an Army, and Maj. Walter Reed for his reporting on the causative virus, its vectors and the methods to control yellow fever.
On the other hand, McCallum describes how the first wave of the influenza pandemic spread rampantly across Europe during World War I because of expeditionary American troop movements. The war effort proved incompatible with quarantining, and the results were devastating to soldiers and civilians alike.
Finally, regarding the pharmacological approach to infectious diseases, McCallum describes how malaria was endemic in much of the European and Pacific World War II theaters of operation. Sadly, for years it damaged combat readiness and cost many soldiers’ lives, even though pharmacologic management was readily available. The problem at its core was getting soldiers to reliably take the medicine.
McCallum aptly points out that these cases are not relegated to historical interest. Indeed, the recent COVID-19 pandemic repeated aspects of chaos, fear, overwhelming death and morbidity, misinformation and distrust in medical advice.
As a lesson for current military and medical leaders, a disciplined and reasoned response to epidemics, albeit difficult to execute, is imperative to conserving the fighting force. Conversely, failure to identify or effectively mitigate and control an epidemic can prove devastating to the war effort—along tactical, operational and strategic spheres.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Caravalho Jr., M.D., U.S. Army retired, is a retired cardiologist. His final military assignment was as Joint Staff surgeon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon. Before that, he was deputy U.S. Army surgeon general. Currently, he leads the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.
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Go Behind the Scenes With Army’s Combat Historians
The U.S. Army Combat Historian and Combat History Operations: World War I to the Vietnam War. Kathryn Roe Coker and Jason Wetzel. Casemate. 208 pages. $34.95
By Brig. Gen. John Brown, U.S. Army retired
Many ARMY magazine readers have enjoyed and benefited from the U.S. Army’s famous “Green Book” official histories of World War II without knowing much about how these histories came to be. The same can be said of the official histories of more recent wars and other publications of the U.S. Army Center of Military History.
Kathryn Roe Coker and Jason Wetzel, both of whom have served as Department of the Army historians, redress this gap with their fine book, The U.S. Army Combat Historian and Combat History Operations: World War I to the Vietnam War.
Coker and Wetzel begin their story with a chapter exploring efforts during World War I to set up an office to create a war diary and write the official history of the conflict. Subsequent chapters cover the maturation of Army historical concepts during the interwar years, the development of World War II historical programs, the training and organization of combat historians and historical units during World War II, and the experiences of combat historians in the Pacific, European and Mediterranean theaters.
Another chapter covers the exploitation of enemy sources to see things from their side. Then, a chapter each covers post-World War II Army military history doctrine, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
The authors amply illustrate the broad and, at times, conflicting requirements faced by combat historians. The thoughtful collection of documents, interviews, maps, artifacts and photographs provides grist for future historians, but as I have seen, commanders in the field often prefer more the immediate narratives or lessons learned of after-action reviews.
I have also noted that interviews, group or individual, can get into the weeds, becoming invaluable only when set into the larger context of the big picture. Technology also must be mastered, with devices such as mimeograph machines and cassette recorders having revolutionary implications for historical collection.
Army combat historians are soldiers, now generally organized and deployed as Military History Detachments. This sets the tone for their training, organization, equipment, lifestyle and assumption of risk. The command support they receive and who they are plugged into can profoundly affect their effectiveness.
Coker’s and Wetzel’s text contains good and bad examples of command relationships with historians. These should be used to enrich the training and preparation of commanders and staffs, as well as combat historians.
Authors such as S.L.A. Marshall, Forrest Pogue and Martin Blumenson have become iconic figures for students of World War II, noted for their monumental works and profound contributions to the history of that war. Coker and Wetzel reach past this fame to describe their developmental years and when these authors served as combat historians and gathered the stories of soldiers in the midst of battle. Many combat historians have gone on to write works of lasting value.
The U.S. Army Combat Historian and Combat History Operations is supported by carefully selected photographs without being overwhelmed by them. Its 153 pages of text are supported by two appendices, 23 pages of endnotes, a bibliography and an index.
I recommend this book to all who are interested in or responsible for U.S. Army history or historical programs. It is an excellent piece of work. It begs for a sequel to bring the story forward to the present day.
Brig. Gen. John Brown, U.S. Army retired, served 33 years in the Army, with his last assignment as chief of military history at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. The author of Kevlar Legions: The Transformation of the United States Army, 1989–2005, he holds a doctorate in history from Indiana University.
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Poetry Helps Troops Express War Horrors
Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets. Michael Korda. Liveright. 400 pages. $26.99
By Geoffrey Wawro
World War I was one of the most heavily censored wars of all time. Governments that went cheerfully off to war in 1914 quickly repented of their zeal and spent the next four years hiding the carnage, casualties and misery they had created from their peoples. Reporters who imagined themselves covering this war as colorfully as they had covered earlier campaigns in South Africa (the Boer War at the turn of the century) and Manchuria (the Russo-Japanese War of 1904) instead were left, as one would-be war correspondent put it, “sitting on the steps of the War Office watching the buses pass.”
Poetry unexpectedly became one of the few rays of truth illuminating the squalid war. But not immediately. In the first months of World War I, poets like American Alan Seeger hastened to join the fight and earn, as Seeger put it, “the rare privilege of dying well.” Seeger would have his “rendezvous with death” on the Somme, in a French uniform.
The British government eagerly promoted the war poetry of Rupert Brooke. He is best remembered for the lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.”
But, author Michael Korda reminds us in this stirring book, Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets, Brooke and Seeger were exceptions. After debacles such as the Battles of Loos and the Somme in France in 1915 and 1916, respectively, poetry increasingly was weaponized by those who opposed the war.
Siegfried Sassoon was the steeplechasing, fox-hunting scion of a wealthy British family. He struck a harsh new tone that alarmed the censors in London. His poem titled “Base Details” ridiculed the blimpish, red-tabbed staff officers who herded infantry into slaughter: “If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath / I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base, / And speed glum heroes up the line to death.”
Sassoon served alongside Robert Graves in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The two officers became friends during the war, and Korda credits Graves, a big, brave, shaggy rugby player, with shifting Sassoon from Brooke-style romance to savage anger at the progress of the war. Graves described the almost comic futility of it all: “Where are we marching? No one knows. / Why are we marching? No one cares.”
By the summer of 1916, Sassoon had changed course. He extended his critique of the high command to the “smug-faced crowds” of civilians who cheered men to their early death. “Pray you’ll never know,” he later sneered, “The hell where youth and laughter go.”
Poems like this earned him four months of rest and therapy at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland. There, Sassoon met another young war poet named Wilfred Owen. Owen had joined the war late—in 1917—and had none of the cachet within the British class system possessed by Graves, Brooke and Sassoon. His father was a railway clerk, and he had never attended university.
Korda describes a meeting of giants at the clinic near Edinburgh in October 1917, when Graves arrived to visit Sassoon, and was introduced to Owen and his poems. “Puff out your chest a little, Owen, & be big—for you’ve more right than most of us,” Graves generously admonished.
Owen would return to the front and be killed just a few days before the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918. He left behind one of the war’s most biting and brilliant poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which Korda rightly judges a “final statement on the sacrifice of a whole generation in the mud and blood of Flanders.”
Korda brilliantly weaves these lives and others in an intellectual history that furnishes new insight into the conditions, conduct and memory of the war on the Western Front.
Geoffrey Wawro is director of the University of North Texas Military History Center and the author of six books, including Sons of Freedom: The Forgotten American Soldiers Who Defeated Germany in World War I.