Damn…I should have liked this book. Right up my middle-aged, white guy, desk-jockey, alley.
Unfortunately it is a 400 page “report” by a “reporter” vs. a story or a consumable work that provides any context or analysis. The most interesting part is the last 20 pages when the author begins to draw conclusions about the things she has seen, people interviewed, and the longer arc of history.
The rest of the work sounds simply like a restatement of an amateur reporter’s list of “who, what, where, and when”…without including even much of the “why”.
All of the special forces members covered in this deserve better. They are reduced to mere shells or cardboard standups. No reader can distinguish one from another or trace the events of a reappearing individual from one event to the next. Simply recounting “Bob was in Panama in 1990 where he led team X in the conflict” and then 100 pages later “Bob returned to the conflict zone in Somalia four years later where he roped into a village” and then 100 more pages later “he retired to write a book on unconventional warfare” does not make for an insightful or interesting read.
None of this is to say what Robinson is recounting her is fake, embellished, or unremarkable…it is. The Special Forces have done remarkable things with limited resources and in ways the American public doesn’t recognize—very different things than the more widely heralded SEAL Teams and other “Tier One” operators. These special forces deserve their skills and accomplishments recounted with the full background, analysis, commentary, color, description, and character that they possess. This isn’t that.
My last gripe here is with the hacks doing the back cover recommendations of the book. In no way did these individuals actually read the book before they were paid to provide a quote. Hell…John McCain and Robert Baer use nearly the same language in their first sentences in these promotions that tell you they were given a script and told “I’ll give you $5000 if you sign off on having said this so we can promote the book under your name”. There is a TON of work done on the actions special forces of all kinds (using the SF term here very generally) over the past 20 years. Choose a different one than this.