Book Review: 'In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat'

© 2005 Picador Books. Book cover photo credit: © Benjamin Lowy

When the U.S. 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division crossed the border between Kuwait and Iraq on the morning of March 20, 2003 as part of the Army's V Corps at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson was one of the media pool members "embedded" with Maj. Gen. David Petraeus' headquarters. At the time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943) was still a senior editor at the Post and was chosen to observe the legendary division that had participated in many famous campaigns since its creation as a parachute unit during the Second World War. Now, having traded in their airplanes for helicopters as far back as the Vietnam War, the Screaming Eagles were on their way north to Baghdad, 12 years after the end of the first Persian Gulf War.

Atkinson was no stranger to either the Army or reporting about the military. His father was a U.S. Army officer in the 1950s, and Rick was born in West Germany during the Cold War. As a result of his boyhood experiences as an "Army brat," Atkinson developed a life-long interest in writing about the military; starting with 1989's The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 all the way to his epic World War II saga, The LIberation Trilogy. 

In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat is Atkinson's 2004 account of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition. triggered by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. In some ways, it's a sequel to the author's 1993 Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was interpreted by many observers as the closing chapter to Operation Desert Storm.

For soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, the road to Baghdad began with a midnight flight out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in late February 2003. For Rick Atkinson, who would spend nearly two months covering the division for The Washington Post, the war in Iraq provided a unique opportunity to observe today's U.S. Army in combat. Now, in this extraordinary account of his odyssey with the 101st, Atkinson presents an intimate and revealing portrait of the soldiers who fight the expeditionary wars that have become the hallmark of our age.

At the center of Atkinson's drama stands the compelling figure of Major General David H. Petraeus, described by one comrade as "the most competitive man on the planet." Atkinson spent virtually all day every day at Petraeus's elbow in Iraq, where he had an unobstructed view of the stresses, anxieties, and large joys of commanding 17,000 soldiers in combat. And all around Petraeus, we see the men and women of a storied division grapple with the challenges of waging war in an unspeakably harsh environment.

With the eye of a master storyteller, a brilliant military historian puts us right on the battlefield. In the Company of Soldiers is a compelling, utterly fresh view of the modern American soldier in action. - Publisher's back cover blurb

Unlike Crusade, Atkinson's book is not a history of the entire Iraq War, a conflict which was ongoing when the hardcover edition was published in 2004. Its narrative is limited to the experiences of the 101st Airborne as part of V Corps from the moment it mobilized in February 2003 to its arrival in Baghdad two months later.

Of the six major works on American military history, In the Company of Soldiers may be Atkinson's most personal book. It's not just a reporters eye account of the 2003 invasion, but it's also part memoir.

We turned around. Najaf was pacified, at least for today. Back at the middle school where No Slack had its battalion command post, Hodges told Petraeus that he had declared Ali's shrine to be a demilitarized zone, "so there's no military presence west of Highway 9." He also had issued edicts outlawing revenge killings, but allowing the looting of Baath Party or Fedayeen properties. "You see guys walking down the street with desks, office chairs, lights, curtains," Hodges said, and I wondered whether authorized pilfering was a slippery slope toward anarchy.

Before we walked back outside, Chris Hughes showed me a terrain model that had been 
discovered in a bathroom stall in a Baathist headquarters. Built on a sheet of plywood, roughly five feet by three feet, it depicted the Iraqi plan for Najaf's defense. Green toy soldiers, representing the Americans, stood below the escarpment on the southwestern approach to the city. Red toy soldiers, representing the Iraqis, occupied revetments along the perimeter avenues, with fallback positions designated in the city center. The model included little plastic cars, plastic palm trees, even plastic donkeys. Nowhere did I see JDAMs, Apaches, Kiowas, Hellfires, or signs of reality.

Although the book is not as long as some of Atkinson's other books (including back matter such as an acknowledgments section and the index, the paperback edition has a page count of 352), it is still an interesting read. Written well before Gen. David Petraeus' fall from grace as CIA Director in 2012 due to an extramarital affair he'd had with his biographer, In the Company of Soldiers naturally paints a positive picture of Petraeus in his element as a combat leader.

Atkinson is a keen observer of both human detail and the ways of the military, and it shows in all of his books. He is also a good writer who draws the reader into the story with his vivid descriptive prose and personality profiles of the men and women he observed during his time with the 21st Century iteration of the Screaming Eagles in Ft. Campbell, Kuwait, and Iraq.

As Tom Brokaw wrote in his review of In the Company of Soldiers, this book is "a beautifully written and memorable account of combat from the top down and bottom up as the 101st Airborne commanders and front-line grunts battle their way to Baghdad.... A must-read."