Closing the book on Iraq: Polarizing war yields several worthy reads - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Closing the book on Iraq: Polarizing war yields several worthy reads

Officially, the last U.S. troops left Iraq in December. But literarily, the war continues.

Some recent takes on the operation from Iraqi Freedom through New Dawn:

1. No Turning Back: One Man’s Inspiring True Story of Courage, Determination and Hope by Bryan Anderson with David Mack (Berkley, 240 pages, $25.95; e-book).

Anderson could be the poster boy for the U.S. legacy in Iraq. He’s already a cover boy: The triple amputee is a spokesman for Quantum Rehab, has acted in film and TV, and appears on an unforgettable January 2007 Esquire cover.

He and his co-writer present an in-your-face but positive memoir.

“This book is not about Iraq,” the former Army sergeant says.

Readers anticipating a gory war story can look elsewhere, although the first sentence is understated and unforgettable: “On the day I got blown up, it was hot as hell.”

When Anderson realizes his limbs are gone, he looks up from the ground and asks fellow soldier Michael Wait: “Do you think I’ll ever get laid again?”

The answer comes later and illustrates the prowess of positive thinking. “Sex with no legs is great,” he volunteers. “There are so many positions I can get into now that I couldn’t when my legs were in the way.”

Such an upbeat philosophy will get in the way of a cynic’s enjoyment, and Anderson admits “this might sound like a bunch of positive-talk b-------, but I’m not just talking out of my ass ... I’ve accepted the bad stuff and just kept moving ahead.”

2. Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi’s Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq by Richard Bonin (Doubleday, 304 pages, $27.95; e-book).

The exiled Chalabi spent decades trying to gain support — from the U.S. and Iran — for his insistence that Saddam Hussein be removed from power, and he gained the favor of the CIA and advisers to President George W. Bush.

Bonin, a producer for “60 Minutes,” observed Chalabi for a decade and interviewed him for 60 hours in Baghdad for this journalistic look at the man behind “what may turn out to be the biggest foreign policy disaster in a generation.”

3. Memoirs From Babylon: A Combat Chaplain’s Life in Iraq’s Triangle of Death by Chaplain Jeff Bryan (Combat Chaplain Ministries, 252 pages, $16).

In 1996, after stints in the National Guard and the regular Army, Bryan befriended a stranger from a Clarksville, Tenn., ministry. He accepts Christ as his “personal Lord and Savior” and sees “every man’s need for a relationship with God.”

He takes being “a soldier of the spirit” seriously after a life “contaminated with selfishness and drugs,” heads to a Missouri Bible college, becomes a military chaplain and arrives in Baghdad a decade after he left the Army.

At the Euphrates River, he notes that “the place considered by scholars and archeologists as the Garden of Eden” is anything but heavenly for the 10th Mountain Division, and a firefight becomes “an important event in my life and ministry. My role might not have been to rain gunfire back on the enemy, but it was equally important.”

4. Warrior Police: Rolling with America’s Military Police in the World’s Trouble Spots by retired Army Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu and Chris Fontana (St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages plus photos, $25.99; e-book).

The authors, founders of the Valhalla Project, say military police took the spotlight in Iraq when “a new realization developed regarding the MPs’ potentially most important role,” which was to establish a local police presence. Their book “seeks to recount the experiences of MPs who do it right.”

Proceeds from the book go to Valhalla, a rural Georgia retreat for military and civilian veterans of combat zones, which plans to open this spring.

5. Task Force Patriot and the End of Combat Operations in Iraq by Pat Proctor (Government Industries, 216 pages, $29.95; e-book).

In his detailed narrative, Proctor, an Army lieutenant colonel, is not afraid to admit a “fatal assumption” or a “serious flaw” that leads to his unit’s realization that “it was time to start from scratch,” again and again.

Frustrations with local politicians, State Department representatives and local business practices get in the Army’s way, but the officer is persuasive.

“There is the money you have to spend to build the project,” he tells an Iraqi contractor, “and there is the money you have to spend to make everyone happy.”

Is the U.S. investment worthwhile?

“We will never know the answer until we leave Iraq and let the Iraqis settle these disputes for themselves,” Proctor says.

6. Awakening Victory: How Iraqi Tribes and American Troops Reclaimed al Anbar Province and Defeated al Qaeda in Iraq by retired Army Lt. Col. Michael E. Silverman (Casemate, 310 pages, $29.95; e-book).

The commander of the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armored of 3rd Infantry Division, documents his unit’s Ramadi tenure beginning in January 2007.

The surge in U.S. troop numbers and the tribal rise against al-Qaida combine to create success, and Silverman believes 2011’s “so-called Arab Spring is a direct result of U.S. actions in Iraq.” In Anbar province, he learns a “valuable lesson”: “America cannot win the Long War on Terror; rather, all we can do is help our Muslim allies win.”

7. American Veterans on War by Elise Forbes Tripp (Olive Branch Press, 456 pages, $22).

Scholar Tripp follows her 30 interviews in 2008’s “Surviving Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories” with another volume, 55 veterans’ takes on World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

A sense of the “natural supremacy of American and Western values” persists in the U.S. and “has been translated into the belief that there is a democratic (meaning American) solution to civil war and insurgency elsewhere. The soldiers in this volume do not necessarily think so.”

Proceeds from the book will support those “who have been injured, or the families of those injured or killed.”