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The career path that led Tommy Franks from the dusty plains of Oklahoma to a military leadership role in three American wars has a familiar trajectory. As a youngster at the University of Texas he was mostly concerned with drinking beer, chasing girls and tooling around in fast cars. He joined the army in 1965 mostly to escape academic disaster --- and there began a steady rise in rank, self-discipline and patriotic fervor. He retired 38 years later with four stars on his uniform.
In AMERICAN SOLDIER, he and collaborator Malcolm McConnell tell this story in soldierly fashion --- straightforwardly, with obvious confidence in the rightness of Franks's judgments of people and situations, and from a worldview starkly divided between good guys and bad guys --- Us and Them.
He was a young junior officer in Vietnam, a one-star general during the first Gulf War, and a four-star general for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His post as leader of the U.S. Central Command put him in charge of military matters over a huge area stretching from Kenya to Pakistan.
He gives his readers a vivid field officer's perspective on Vietnam, where he saw plenty of stiff action. His account comes complete with a forest of military acronyms (there is a seven-page glossary at the end of his text, which is very helpful to readers who are not four-star generals) and plenty of the casual profanity without which no army has ever seemed able to function.
The book is generally well-written --- that feckless college dropout ends up quoting Homer and Shakespeare --- but whether the credit belongs to Franks himself or to McConnell is not easy to decide. At any rate, Franks comes across as a clever fellow, willing to devise and implement out-of-the-box solutions to problems and thoroughly ingrained with the military virtue of loyalty. He makes the point, though, that loyalty must flow in both directions to be effective --- from troops to commander, but also from commander to his men. Point scored.
Another theme that will hold the nonmilitary reader's interest is the incredible sophistication of modern computer-dominated warfare. Officers sitting in Tampa, Florida, watch in real time the progress of a motorcade in Afghanistan and see it assaulted by pilotless aircraft controlled from hundreds of miles away. Things have come a long, long way since my own days as a grunt in the Army Security Agency half a century ago!
Franks tells his story in a series of discrete snapshots, skipping over long time periods to concentrate on moments he deems important. His obvious devotion to his wife Cathy is a touching sidelight. As his story progresses, though, the book can get bogged down in the minutiae of military planning and logistics.
Inevitably, most reader interest will center on Franks's views on the highly controversial Iraq adventure. His loyalty, as one might expect, lies totally with President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with whom he was in virtually daily contact. A general, after all, is required to be loyal to his commanders-in-chief. Tommy Franks, even in retirement, has only fulsome praise for Bush and a kind of wary respect for Rumsfeld.
More unexpected is his irritation with the Pentagon military bureaucracy and with some high ranking civilians in the defense establishment. He expresses impatience with attempts at micro-management by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stating in one memo that their presence at his daily teleconferences with Bush and Rumsfeld is "not helpful." Late in his career he turned down Rumsfeld's offer to become Army Chief of Staff himself.
He dismisses Richard Clarke, the now-famous National Security Council operative and controversial author, as ineffective and self-serving, and he has little good to say about one of Rumsfeld's super-hawk subordinates, Douglas Feith.
Perhaps his most pungent quote on military matters is the wry comment that "the army doesn't issue wisdom when it pins on the stars."
His end-of-the-day conclusions on Iraq closely parallel the administration line: Saddam Hussein was a mortal peril to America. Postwar Iraq, contrary to media reports, is an unpublicized success story; we must stay the course and finish the job.
He shares the old soldier's typical grudging toleration of the media, fuming when they report bad news, trying to remain honest with them while concealing information he does not want them to know.
This is an honest book by a soldier who did his job well. You may not agree with Tommy Franks on all the larger issues, but you have to admit that, after his unpromising start, he sure found his place in life.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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