Maybe the military thriller A Soldier’s Duty by Thomas E. Ricks reads like something off the front pages of a newspaper because that’s where Ricks does most of his writing — he’s the Washington Post‘s Pentagon correspondent. He may be the best military reporter in the business, winning the Pulitzer Prize (while with the Wall Street Journal) and authoring an acclaimed book on the Marines, Making the Corps.
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
Fiction Anchored in Reality
A Soldier's Duty tells of two majors assigned to the Pentagon and thrust into an environment full of dark conspiracy and morale so low that some officers contemplate drastic action against their rivals and civilian leaders. Unlike so many books in the genre, it's tremendously literate and full of searing observations about life in uniform today. Best of all, it offers a great story, as the first batch of reviews suggests. The Los Angeles Times calls A Soldier's Duty a “briskly paced, engrossing tale of individual maneuvering and institutional agony.” Publisher's Weekly deemed it “an unusually thoughtful military thriller” and Kirkus Reviews gave this concise assessment: “Fast, sharp, and tight: a winner.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also put A Soldier's Duty on its “best of summer reading” list.
Last week, National Review Online's John J. Miller interviewed Ricks about his new book, some old ones, and the modern military.
John J. Miller: You're an accomplished writer of nonfiction — a well-respected book on the Marines and prize-winning daily journalism. Why did you turn to fiction?
Thomas E. Ricks: In writing A Soldier's Duty I found that sometimes you can tell more truth with fiction than with fact. My first book, Making the Corps, was a non-fiction account of life at the bottom of the military, about raw recruits at Marine boot camp. In the novel I turned to the other end of the military, the life of the top brass. I was repeatedly struck in recent years while covering the military that the lives of four-star officers had become quite difficult, especially in Washington. One service chief, Admiral Boorda of the Navy, killed himself. Another one, General Fogleman of the Air Force, stepped down early because he had lost faith in the defense secretary. Several other top officers left office feeling diminished by the experience, according to people who know them well. And in an unprecedented act, a large group of former service chiefs and other top officers endorsed George W. Bush in last year's presidential election, despite having been appointed to their positions by the Clinton administration.
I wanted to look at why the US military is so angry nowadays, and especially why it is so difficult to be a general or admiral. But I found that I couldn't get at this very well through non-fiction. I would get bland answers when I asked in interviews. But when I talked to people off the record, I found that some of them were in emotional turmoil.
So in A Soldier's Duty I wrote what I thought of as a “reported novel.” It is a work of fiction, but it is anchored in reality. Large chunks of my book come from interviews and from emails I received while writing it. In this way I tried to get at the inner lives and emotions of top officers nowadays.
The Internet Effect
Miller: You write of a brewing revolt in the ranks of the military — a Seven Days in May situation taking place under a Republican president. Just how fictional is this possibility?
Ricks: I think there is an important distinction to make here. Seven Days in May was about the military taking civilian power. A Soldier's Duty isn't. I am not predicting a military coup d'etat. I don't think that is at all likely.
What is far more plausible, and so far more worrisome, is a military that becomes less responsive to its civilian leadership and starts picking and choosing among its orders. I think we got a whiff of that with Bosnia policy in 1993 through 1995, with the US military resisting the trend of American policy. I remember going to the US European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, and being told emphatically, “There are no good guys in Bosnia, and everyone is equally to blame.” At the time, it was explicit US policy that the Bosnian Muslims were the victims of aggression. You can disagree with that policy — but if you do, I think you should either be quiet or resign. What I don't think you should do is use an official government position to undermine your government's policy.
That is the nut of A Soldier's Duty — what happens when part of the US military that begins holding “the politicians” at arm's length, and continues to debate (and even stymie) its orders even after they are given. In this case, dissent eventually grows into insubordination and sedition.
Miller: A Soldier's Duty takes place in 2004 and describes a military stretched so thin by extensive missions that it has to put poorly trained troops into the field, with fatal results. How closely does this reflect our current environment?
Ricks: I set it in the near future so I could take current trends and extrapolate them into the future. I worry that we have a big military that is used heavily overseas but isn't particularly well understood by its civilian overseers nowadays. As late as the Vietnam War, for example, two-thirds of the Congress had military experience. Today two-thirds don't. The same is true for the executive branch, for business and financial elites, and perhaps most of all for the media.
I am not just talking about a decline in sympathy for the military. I also think there is a decline in understanding of the military instrument, of what it is good for and what it isn't good for.
So I think that if current trends continue, we could wind up in a situation where we send out troops who are appropriate for one sort of mission, but then find themselves in a jam when the nature of the mission changes — which happens a lot.
Miller: The Internet plays a big role in A Soldier's Duty, with junior officers having a means of communication they've never had before. What effect is the Internet having in the military, especially on morale?
Ricks: The Internet, and especially email, is having an upsetting effect on the military hierarchy. The irony, of course, is that the military invented the Internet.
One major reason for the military hierarchy we have today was to control the flow of information downward. In the mass militaries of the 19th century, literate officers led illiterate enlisted men.
But now we have an extremely literate, computer-savvy enlisted military that frequently is more comfortable with the information age than are the people who lead them. And privates are sending emails to captains and lieutenants to generals. I think you will even see this seep into warfighting, to situations where, for example, company commanders will tell the battalion staff (or their computers) “This is what I need to know and when I need to know it.”
Overall, I think email is having a distorting effect on morale, straining existing relationships. Specifically, I suspect it is eroding “vertical cohesion” (that is, up and down the chain of command) while strengthening “horizontal cohesion” (that is, across the level of one's peers, whether privates fresh out of boot camp who can compare circumstances at their first post to majors who fought together in the Gulf War). I don't think today's generals have caught up to this new reality.
All-Time Favorites
Miller: How does the Pentagon's leadership view President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld? How does the rank-and-file view them?
Ricks: I think that the top brass expected a Reagan-like embrace from Rumsfeld and Bush and were surprised to get more of a cold shoulder. For the first several months of this year, senior officers complained to me that Rumsfeld acted as if he were doing a hostile takeover of a corporation and that they were somehow tainted by their association with the Clinton administration. Some found this insulting, because they felt they had been doing their duty as professional military officers serving a democracy.
This friction between the new administration and the top brass was surprising because military officers generally seemed to favor Bush in the election. I would guess that 80 percent of officers who voted cast their votes for Bush. In June I even heard in the Pentagon some nostalgia for the Clinton years, which stunned me.
Usually the rank and file doesn't pay much attention to the generals at the Pentagon. In this case, I think they are, especially in the Army and Marines, where there is a lot of worry that Rumsfeld ultimately will cut some ground troops in order to fund his own priorities of missile defense, space, and intelligence. I was struck that in May, the former chief of staff of the Army, General Gordon Sullivan, referred publicly to Pentagon spending on space as “an $8 billion rathole.” Retired officers sometimes say what the active-duty ones feel they can't say.
Miller: What do you read in your spare time? Who are your favorite authors? Are there any books on military history you particularly recommend? How about other military thrillers along the lines of A Soldier's Duty?
Ricks: I read huge amounts of history and fiction. My favorite author is Winston Churchill, who I think was the greatest person of the 20th century. Anyone who hasn't read his World War II memoirs should.
Stuff I have been reading lately: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as my treat for myself for finishing my novel. The two volumes of John Masters's wonderful autobiography, Bugles and a Tiger (about being a young officer in India in the 1930s) and The Road Past Mandalay (about fighting in Burma in World War II and rising from major to brigadier general). I also really liked Murray and Millet's new history of World War II, A War to Be Won (the book for people who think they know everything about that war) and Fred Anderson's new history of the French and Indian War.
As for my all-time favorites, there are a handful of books that I buy any time I see a used copy on sale so I can give out copies to friends. Among these are: The World War II memoirs of Field Marshal Slim, Defeat Into Victory, a wonderful account of being beaten by the Japanese, learning from his mistakes and rebuilding his force and winning. Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed, about being a young Marine in the Pacific in World War II. Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which is a better account of military culture than people remember. Xenophon's The Persian Expedition, about an area in which the US military is still active. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop remains the best book ever written about war correspondents. And Fitzroy Maclean's Eastern Approaches, which is primarily about aiding the Yugoslav resistance during World War II.
I also have read every word ever written by James Webb.
I've also been enjoying some fiction set in the Civil War by an author named Owen Parry. Those new to him should start with Faded Coat of Blue, set in wartime Washington.
I should also mention Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle, the classic novel of the 20th century US Army. My own A Soldier's Duty is an attempt to think about how Myrer's characters would react to today's world.
I don't know of any military thrillers quite like mine — my private recipe was two parts Graham Greene to one part Tom Clancy, with dashes of Ralph Peters and Ward Just thrown in.
Miller: Is there another book in your future? Fiction or non-fiction?
Ricks: Both, I hope. I woke up recently with the first line of another novel in my head. And I love writing non-fiction about today's US military, which is a subject I would pay to cover.
