Heroic Soldiers Tell Their Own Stories

American Heroes. James Patterson and Matt Eversmann With Tim Malloy and Chris Mooney. Little, Brown and Co. 384 pages. $32.50

By Col. Cole Kingseed, U.S. Army retired

On the heels of their No. 1 New York Times bestseller Walk in My Combat Boots, James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, with Tim Malloy and Chris Mooney, have collaborated on a fitting sequel honoring America’s most gallant service members. Superbly crafted from dozens of interviews with the country’s most decorated military heroes—or, if the warrior is deceased, someone close to them—American Heroes recounts the stories of the recipients of the nation’s highest awards for valor.

Patterson is perhaps the world’s most prolific storyteller. The creator of fictional hero Alex Cross, Patterson has over 200 books to his credit, as well as 10 Emmy Awards and the National Humanities Medal, awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and presented by the president to recognize individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities. Eversmann is a retired U.S. Army first sergeant with over 20 years of service. In October 1993, Eversmann was a member of Task Force Ranger, the unit immortalized in the book and subsequent film Black Hawk Down.

In their most recent book, Patterson and Eversmann employ a first-person account of American warriors that illustrates the importance of duty, character-based leadership and selfless service. The 30 chapters range from World War II to the Korean War, Vietnam and the war against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Army veterans dominate the text, Patterson and Eversmann chronicle male and female military heroes from all branches of service.

Each of these heroes has bequeathed a legacy of heroism to all Americans, but the true value of American Heroes is the life lessons these warriors share. Take, for example, retired Col. Ralph Puckett Jr., a 2021 recipient of the Medal of Honor for actions in Korea on Nov. 25–26, 1950, when his Ranger company faced six Chinese attacks in defense of Hill 205, 60 miles south of the Yalu River. 

Initially awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions in Korea, Puckett earned another, along with two Silver Stars, as a battalion commander in Vietnam. During his military career, Puckett received five Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, and was later inaugurated into the Ranger Hall of Fame.

Reflecting on his career in American Heroes and discussing receiving the Medal of Honor, Puckett credits his fellow Rangers for his success: “My Rangers deserve this award. They did the training. They did the fighting. They did the dying. … They’re the ones who earned this Medal of Honor.” Puckett died in April and his remains were authorized to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol rotunda, a rare honor.

Should women serve alongside men on the front lines in today’s Army? Ask Command Sgt. Maj. Cindy Pritchett, recipient of the 2002 Living Legend Award from the Army Heritage Center Foundation. A member of the exclusive Sergeant Morales Club, which is awarded to active-duty NCOs who promote the highest ideals of professionalism and leadership, Pritchett served as a battalion sergeant major, and later command sergeant major, for Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan.

Pritchett’s message about women in the military is: “Give us an obstacle, okay, we’ll overcome it. When we overcome that obstacle, there’ll be another one. At some point, you’re going to run out of obstacles for us to overcome.”

Staff Sgt. Travis Mills suffered debilitating wounds from an IED in Afghanistan on April 10, 2012. Shielding his soldiers, Mills took the brunt of the blast, resulting in the loss of all four limbs. After a long period of recovery, Mills reflected upon his fate: “I’m not a wounded warrior. I’m a recalibrated warrior. My injuries are a part of my life but they’re not my whole life.” Mills later established the Travis Mills Foundation, a nonprofit that provides all-expenses-paid vacations for “recalibrated” veterans and their families.

In sharing these stories of American heroes, Patterson and Eversmann have made a monumental contribution to comprehending the motivation and distinguished service of American warriors. American Heroes is a book that every citizen should read, and it ought to be on the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List.

Col. Cole Kingseed, U.S. Army retired, a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, is a writer and consultant. He holds a doctorate in history from Ohio State University.

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Black WWII Battalions Commemorated

Battling While Black: General Patton’s Heroic African American WWII Battalions. Maj. Gen. Peter Gravett, USA Ret. Koehler Books. 318 pages. $28.95

By Connor Williams

Retired Maj. Gen. Peter Gravett begins his new book, Battling While Black: General Patton’s Heroic African American WWII Battalions, with a fact most of us would rather forget: World War II was supposed to have been a white man’s war. In the decades leading up to the conflict, the U.S. military’s racial doctrine was governed by an exceedingly racist U.S. Army War College study published in 1925 and reissued annually for more than a dozen years.

According to the study, “mental inferiority and the inherent weakness of his character” made African American men only fit for sanitation, supply, gravedigging and other menial tasks. Indeed, it was only due to efforts by Black leaders that African American draftees and recruits were trained for battle at all. Even then, they were intended strictly as fighting reserves, never meant for action. The Army in particular—and the military in general—organized its structure and strategy around 15 blatantly false and demeaning principles that variously and oxymoronically painted Black men as too cowardly to fight, too savage to follow orders, too simple to lead and too dishonest to follow.

Gravett counters these slanders by highlighting the service of four battalions in Gen. George Patton Jr.’s Third U.S. Army that found their way to the front, serving and sacrificing on behalf of a massive war effort. He offers stirring stories of how, though Jim Crow laws requiring racial segregation meant that these battalion members entered the war as “mere sideshows,” their heroic service, dedication to duty and selfless sacrifice ensured that “each one ended their service as the main attraction.”

Indeed, Gravett’s focus on the service of four battalions—the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the 761st Tank Battalion, the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion and the 6888th Postal Battalion (the only unit of Black women to deploy overseas in the entire war)—demonstrates how their actions sometimes garnered respect in the memories of their historical contemporaries. And he makes certain that the battalions will shine brightly in our memories.

A highly successful and long-serving Black officer himself, Gravett structures his stories around not just the actions at Normandy, the hedgerows and the warehouses, or the Battle of the Bulge that earned each unit acclaim, but also the slights the battalion members endured during training, the biases they faced while serving and the cruelties they suffered on returning to the United States. This start-to-finish technique, told with all the experience of a career soldier, provides the full context and history of each group of soldiers who simultaneously fought the Nazis and Jim Crow. The book also re-creates the incredible movements and moments these soldiers fought in, through both victories and defeats. 

Gravett is not a traditionally trained historian, and at times this shifts the tenor of his book. Readers seeking a traditional thesis and historical structure will need to drop those expectations, and some sections of the book can be repetitive. One area that might have benefited from more historical focus is how the soldiers’ exploits impacted African Americans on the homefront, and also how the homefront impacted their service.

The tradeoff, however, is strong: Readers of Gravett’s book get to follow the experiences of several units of dedicated soldiers in every aspect of training, tragedy and triumph. He shares stories of men who floated military balloons under fire at Normandy, the tremendous terror and tenacity tankers and artillerymen faced in the Battle of the Bulge, and female soldiers’ revolutionary efforts to efficiently and effectively deliver mail and all the hope it contained. Throughout it all, readers see the extraordinary efforts of these battalions that battled while Black.

Tragically, because of Jim Crow, their efforts were not heralded nearly enough in their day. Triumphantly, with the help of Gravett’s book, we can—and should—commemorate them in ours.

Connor Williams served as lead historian for the congressional Naming Commission. He works in the departments of History and African American Studies at Yale University, Connecticut. He will receive a dual doctorate in history and African American studies from Yale in the spring.

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Story of a National Guard Career Informs, Resonates

Confessions of a Weekend Warrior: Thirty-Five Years in the National Guard. Brig. Gen. Paul “Greg” Smith, USA Ret. McFarland & Co. Inc. 246 pages. $34.95

By Col. Steve Patarcity, U.S. Army retired

As a retired officer whose majority of service was in the U.S. Army Reserve, I have always disliked the term “weekend warrior.” To me, it implies an unmerited observation that the members of the Army’s reserve component, consisting of troops in both the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, are somehow lesser soldiers than their Regular Army compatriots.

True, the service of reserve component troops is performed primarily due to their statutory requirement of 39 days of training annually, consisting of one weekend a month and two to three weeks of annual training, but they put more time into their units than most from the outside normally see. However, my curiosity got the best of me to see what retired Brig. Gen. Paul “Greg” Smith had to say in Confessions of a Weekend Warrior: Thirty-Five Years in the National Guard.

The book, which chronicles Smith’s three-plus decades of service in the Massachusetts National Guard, starts slowly. But I was drawn increasingly into his narrative as his story continued. There were many events that would be familiar to anyone with a long reserve component career—some humorous, some sad, some nostalgic, some irritating, some thought-provoking.

What is obvious is that Smith, who has written for ARMY magazine, constantly sought to do better, to learn from his mistakes and to seek self-improvement. Above all, he held to a guiding principle of mission-men-self, in that order. His thoughts and observations as the Guard changed over the years are poignant and to the point. After each chapter chronicling a particular time or assignment, Smith briefly analyzes what happened, the effects on him and his soldiers, and the lessons he learned.

Confessions of a Weekend Warrior turns out to be an excellent story of one soldier’s coming of age in the Massachusetts Guard who matures from a naive and inexperienced young lieutenant into an officer of skill and acumen who led from the front, took care of his soldiers and loved his state and country.

Smith’s recall of events and persons from his past service serves him well as he provides vignettes of his interactions with subordinates, peers and superiors that clearly illustrate lessons he seeks to impart to the reader with each chapter. These particular stories resonated with me as I have worked, trained and deployed with the Massachusetts National Guard, a personal connection that made the book more interesting.

Readers of the book who are familiar with the Guard and Reserve will take a lot from Smith’s experiences, while those serving in the active component will gain a greater and broader perspective of what it means to serve as a part-time member of the Army.

But I still don’t care for the title.

Col. Steve Patarcity, U.S. Army retired, is a civilian strategic planner on the staff of the Office of the Chief of Army Reserve, the Pentagon. He retired in 2010 after 33 years of service in the active Army and the U.S. Army Reserve, which included military police and armor assignments in the U.S., Kuwait and Iraq.

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Advice for Reentering the Civilian World

Front-Line Leadership: How to Eliminate Complacency and Build All-In Engagement. Patrick Nelson. Wiley. 240 pages. $28

By Lt. Col. Chad Storlie, U.S. Army retired

Writing about the military-to-civilian transition is difficult. An author must capture two audiences—military and civilian readers—while providing effective advice to both. Further, many of those readers will be skeptical, asking, what can the U.S. Army teach me?

In Front-Line Leadership: How to Eliminate Complacency and Build All-In Engagement, Patrick Nelson delivers on all fronts by writing a book that is personable, usable and effective for both military and civilian audiences.

There are four elements to creating an effective military-to-civilian transition framework. The first is author credibility. Nelson delivers his honest, up-front and no-nonsense lessons in a clear, consistent and intellectually available way for a wide audience.

Nelson’s military credentials as an Army NCO are a welcome addition to this field. Most authors in the military-to-civilian field are officers with a similar perspective that lacks fresh insight. Nelson breaks through this “officer-as-expert” perspective with practicality, streamlined insight and day-to-day tips essential to organizational success.

Too often, military-to-civilian books overfocus on strategy and lose the leadership component. Nelson’s focus on leadership foundations, setting examples and teaching is welcome. NCOs are among the best, most underappreciated secrets for organizations seeking to improve workforce skills and leadership.

The second element for an effective military-to-civilian transition framework is clear organization. Front-Line Leadership is divided into three parts: Leading Yourself, Leading Teams and Leading the Culture, each with four chapters. Every chapter explains the importance of its subject, offers examples from Nelson’s military service and concludes with a personal challenge for the reader.

The use of simple writing and clear advice makes this book a useful, quick and effective read. It offers the perfect recipe during military-to-civilian transitions when time and immediate advice are of the essence.

The third element is the “how-to” of translating military skills into organizations. Nelson provides solid examples of his military experience and how he effectively used his skills of motivation, accountability and leadership within a military context. What is missing in this book are more detailed descriptions of how those military skills translate to the civilian world. Instances of how businesses lost their employees’ motivation and then used Nelson’s teachings to restore that motivation would have been a welcome addition.

The fourth element of the transition framework is helping civilian audiences understand the value of military skills within their organizations. In the Leading the Culture section, Nelson does his best work in identifying failures in organizations and businesses, and how military skills could fill the gap. He uses examples ranging from failed health technology company Theranos (poor culture) to The Container Store (good culture) to demonstrate how military skills are valuable for civilian audiences.

Front-Line Leadership does a solid job demonstrating how to use leadership and planning in academic, business, nonprofit, military and government settings. This book is a must for any soldier transitioning to the civilian world, and it also would be a key reference for undergraduate and graduate business classes stressing the importance of leadership.

Nelson has delivered an excellent first work that brings the value of military skills to a broad audience.

 

Lt. Col. Chad Storlie, U.S. Army retired, is an adjunct professor of marketing, a midlevel marketing executive and the author of Combat Leader to Corporate Leader: 20 Lessons to Advance Your Civilian Career.