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13 reviews for:
The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966
Rick Atkinson
4.26 AVERAGE
13 reviews for:
The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966
Rick Atkinson
4.26 AVERAGE
This book seems like a bit of a hen's tooth to my mind. A fascinating, readable, very comprehensive yet also incredibly detailed dive into a part of history I really knew very little about going in.
Gives all sorts of facts, figures and juicy details whilst still keeping them, well, juicy. A dry tome of events and statistics, this ain't.
Somehow the author covered his subject in painstaking detail without making it any less of an enjoyable narrative. The subject itself may sound kind of niche, but through that subject the book takes a good look at a dazzlingly wide array of subjects - and of course, I've come away with an understanding of West Point (and the American military as a whole) that is 100% improved on the next-to-nothing I knew before.
Gives all sorts of facts, figures and juicy details whilst still keeping them, well, juicy. A dry tome of events and statistics, this ain't.
Somehow the author covered his subject in painstaking detail without making it any less of an enjoyable narrative. The subject itself may sound kind of niche, but through that subject the book takes a good look at a dazzlingly wide array of subjects - and of course, I've come away with an understanding of West Point (and the American military as a whole) that is 100% improved on the next-to-nothing I knew before.
God. What a book.
I don't claim to have read many books, and of the ones I have read... not one made me well up quite like this one. Perhaps it's because Ken Burn's excellent The Vietnam War documentary still fresh on my mind, or because I have been watching the near-nonstop news coverage of the death of US soldiers in Niger and the footage of a grieving wife, or maybe all of the above, this book hit me especially hard.
As the title already suggested, in this book you follow a half dozen or so young men from the moment they stepped onto West Point, through the hell that was Vietnam, and into life as warriors, husbands, fathers, etc. Going in I knew that not all of them would survive, but I had hoped that this would be different. Following them through the beast barracks, commissioning, Ranger training and into Vietnam, I came to love these men, and to watch them fall one by one in Vietnam... that was heart wrenching. Every death felt like a part of me died. Every widow, sons, and daughters left behind felt like a stab in the heart.
But, luckily for us, the class of '66 was so much more than Vietnam. From George Crocker carrying on in service to Jack Wheeler and Tom Carhart making the Vietnam Memorial a reality, the class of '66 showed us that they could (and did) overcome all adversities, and truly live up to those fabled words uttered by MacArthur: duty, country, honor.
Simply put... a phenomenal book by any metric. I can't recommend this enough.
I don't claim to have read many books, and of the ones I have read... not one made me well up quite like this one. Perhaps it's because Ken Burn's excellent The Vietnam War documentary still fresh on my mind, or because I have been watching the near-nonstop news coverage of the death of US soldiers in Niger and the footage of a grieving wife, or maybe all of the above, this book hit me especially hard.
As the title already suggested, in this book you follow a half dozen or so young men from the moment they stepped onto West Point, through the hell that was Vietnam, and into life as warriors, husbands, fathers, etc. Going in I knew that not all of them would survive, but I had hoped that this would be different. Following them through the beast barracks, commissioning, Ranger training and into Vietnam, I came to love these men, and to watch them fall one by one in Vietnam... that was heart wrenching. Every death felt like a part of me died. Every widow, sons, and daughters left behind felt like a stab in the heart.
But, luckily for us, the class of '66 was so much more than Vietnam. From George Crocker carrying on in service to Jack Wheeler and Tom Carhart making the Vietnam Memorial a reality, the class of '66 showed us that they could (and did) overcome all adversities, and truly live up to those fabled words uttered by MacArthur: duty, country, honor.
Simply put... a phenomenal book by any metric. I can't recommend this enough.
One of the hazards of being Santa Claus in a library is that one sees all sorts of interesting items in between promises for Barbie dolls and AK-47s. I happened to run across Rick Atkinson's Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 in the Forreston Public Library. This is just a wonderful book. Based on scores of interviews, Atkinson spent 10 years gathering material. The reader gets to know the pains and pleasures (very few indeed) of 4 years at West Point. The class becomes a microcosm of American society for the next 20 years as many of the officers suffer the same agonies and worries as their countrymen. Atkinson describes the revolution that Kennedy tried to foment in the officer corps. In his address to West Point in 1962, Kennedy referred obliquely to the war in southeast Asia as a new kind of war with insurgents, assassins, ambushes and an enemy seeking to win by exhaustion rather than engagement. Kennedy wanted the new officers to be as much diplomats as soldiers, particularly to be nation builders. After Vietnam, an American officer said to his Vietnamese counterpart: "You know you never beat us in battle." To which the other replied, "That's true, it's also irrelevant." West Point resisted the change. They were used to creating a fighter who gave no quarter and who won by massive firepower. Yet the army desperately needed a new mission in the atomic age so counter-insurgency techniques were a godsend yet these proficiencies were virtually unknown. In 1951, a senator asked Omar Bradley if the army had learned anything new fighting in North Korea. His reply was that "we have certainly been up against one type of warfare we never had before, and that is the guerilla type, in which you have infiltration of your lines by large groups." Military historians were stunned. The 19th century army had destroyed a whole continent of gorilla fighters, often by fighting unconventionally; they had successfully defeated the Tagaloos in the Philippines, not to mention the British in the late 18th century. West Point Superintendent Dave Richard Palmer wrote, "The army corporate memory was little more than one generation long, stretching back no further than the experiences of the men in it."
The impact of Vietnam on the corps was tremendous. The contrast between the strict honor code of the Point and the mendacity of the army in the field: lying on readiness reports and digging up graves to inflate body counts. Ironically, the first class of '66 graduate to die became a metaphor for the war. His own rifle killed him when he became mired in mud and handed his M-16 to a soldier butt first without the safety on. The soldier accidentally hit the trigger and Frank Rybecki died in a hail of his own bullets. The number of soldiers killed by friendly fire was astonishing. In the book's most intense section we watch several '66 graduates maneuver their troops up hill 875, 6 of the 8 classmates in the battalion were to become casualties. One died as a jet flew the wrong trajectory and dropped his bomb in the middle of Company C killing 42 and wounding all the rest. Paradoxically, the hill was then evacuated after finally being taken. The West Point chaplain's story is particularly poignant as he presides over an increasing number of funerals of boys whose weddings he had officiated at not too many months before. Atkinson follows the class through Grenada and Panama and for many into their civilian careers. An interesting tidbit: Battle fatigue causalities (acute environmental reaction -- which I always thought was something parents suffered from) was much lower in Vietnam (2-3%) than in WW II (20-30%). A WW II study found that soldiers reached peak efficiency at 90 days of combat and that after 200-240 days the value of battle-hardened men to their units became negligible. That was the reason for one-year tours in Vietnam.
The impact of Vietnam on the corps was tremendous. The contrast between the strict honor code of the Point and the mendacity of the army in the field: lying on readiness reports and digging up graves to inflate body counts. Ironically, the first class of '66 graduate to die became a metaphor for the war. His own rifle killed him when he became mired in mud and handed his M-16 to a soldier butt first without the safety on. The soldier accidentally hit the trigger and Frank Rybecki died in a hail of his own bullets. The number of soldiers killed by friendly fire was astonishing. In the book's most intense section we watch several '66 graduates maneuver their troops up hill 875, 6 of the 8 classmates in the battalion were to become casualties. One died as a jet flew the wrong trajectory and dropped his bomb in the middle of Company C killing 42 and wounding all the rest. Paradoxically, the hill was then evacuated after finally being taken. The West Point chaplain's story is particularly poignant as he presides over an increasing number of funerals of boys whose weddings he had officiated at not too many months before. Atkinson follows the class through Grenada and Panama and for many into their civilian careers. An interesting tidbit: Battle fatigue causalities (acute environmental reaction -- which I always thought was something parents suffered from) was much lower in Vietnam (2-3%) than in WW II (20-30%). A WW II study found that soldiers reached peak efficiency at 90 days of combat and that after 200-240 days the value of battle-hardened men to their units became negligible. That was the reason for one-year tours in Vietnam.