Last week, I listened to this interview by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, with former Marine platoon leader Donovan Campbell -- who served three combat tours, two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. His book, Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood, was published this week, I ordered it as soon as I heard the interview and so my copy arrived yesterday. I am about 100 pages into it, and it is some book. Donovan is splendid and deeply honest writer, describing his strengths and weaknesses without flinching, and he does an astounding job of bringing you into the scene. It is not only a great book about the love and brotherhood in a combat platoon, it provides lovely general lessons about what it feels like and how to be effective at leading people who are your face-to-face charges, not those distant subordinates you barely know, but the people who know your quirks,habits, and the rest of the human stuff about you.
To give you a taste, Terry Gross asked Donovan to read this passage about how to lead during combat below:
"You can't think of home, you can't miss your wife, and you can't wonder how it would feel to take a round through the neck. You can only pretend that you're already dead and thus free yourself to focus on three things: 1)finding and killing the enemy, 2) communicating the situation and resulting actions to adjacent unit and higher headquarters, and 3) triaging and treating your wounded. If you love your men, you naturally think about number three first, but if you do you're wrong. The grim logic of combat dictates that numbers one and two take precdence."
I told you the guy can write. I can hardly wait to finish the book.
I just finished reading this and came across your post while looking at reviews. Agreed, it's a fantastic book. I've done three embeds in Iraq as a writer (2 of them with Marines in Fallujah), and this is about as good and realistic as it gets for an infantry-level view of one of the redder red-zones of post-invasion Iraq.
Posted by: Bill from INDC | March 27, 2009 at 12:27 PM
Thank you for the review. I have this Fresh Air podcast still in my listening queue and I just moved it up. I look forward to hearing it. I am curious when you have a bond between your men and then must focus on killing and communication to save the group, which logically makes sense, how do you reconcile the emotional side when a decision has to be made to forgo the wounded?
Posted by: Jeffrey | March 12, 2009 at 10:03 PM