Death Ground

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4. JAN. 1999

Bolger, a serving army colonel, is an established writer of military fiction (Feast of Bones) and military analysis (The Battle for Hunger Hill). This is his most significant work to date, important both for students of the contemporary U.S. Army and for general readers--even those normally uninterested in military matters. Bolger documents the infantry's change, over the past 60 years, from a mass force of citizen soldiers to a small body of elite professionals. He presents each currently existing type of infantry--paratroopers, air assault, mechanized, light, rangers and marines--in recent action. For the paratroops, it's the jump into Panama during Operation Just Cause. The helicopter-borne air assault battalions and the mechanized infantry are showcased, along with the rangers, in Operation Desert Storm. The light infantry's finest hour was in Mogadishu, where its flexibility and fighting power saved a trapped American raiding party. The marines appear as peace enforcers in Liberia. In each case study, Bolger emphasizes the importance of quality and preparation, making it quite clear that will without skill and motivation without competence are certain routes to disaster. His style is colloquial and his tone triumphalist, but his message and his subtext are both clear: the grunt has evolved into a warrior, but the gain in expertise brings its own perils. While praising today's infantry as the best the country has ever fielded, Bolger raises the prospect that the U.S. military, by emphasizing technology and economy, will leave the country with an elite infantry too small to sustain heavy losses and too specialized to be quickly replaced.