Canter Bridge

In a political era when scandalously few of the United States’ political leaders have beenshaped by military service, this book provides a fascinating look at a formative moment in the career of HR McMaster, who as this reviewer sets pen to paper serves as the country’s National Security Advisor.
The brief survey of an armored battle that takes pride of place in a world that sees few such large-scale engagements of tanks tells as well the satisfying story of the U.S. Military’s improbable feat of transformation from post-Vietnam malaise through to the disciplined, strategically minded force that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s forces in the First Gulf War (1990-91).

Guardia’s Fires of Babylon chronicles the U.S. Army’s pivot from an anti-Soviet blocking mission that had lost its relevance by the time the Berlin Wall crumbled to a highly fluid challenge from operating positions in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and eventually Iraq itself. It was commanders like McMaster (a Captain at the time of 73 Easting) who brought the discipline and savvy that produced overwhelming military success against an Iraqi force that was judged to be capable of kicking butt on the battlefield. In the end, only one butt got kicked in an epic slaughter that could have led to the removal of Saddam but for the political considerations that led the first President Bush to pull up short.

Yet none of this was foreordained. Things might have turned out badly. That they did not is a story that deserves retelling, particularly in the environment I mention in this review’s first paragraph: one where a highly disciplined fighting force enjoys emotional support from a populace that has little real understanding of what it takes to fight.

Guardia performs his narrative duty in a way that puts flesh and blood, face and voice to a limited number of armored warriors who prepared assiduously to face down Iraq and then did so with stunning speed and results. We follow them from Germany to Saudi and then across the berm into Iraq. This reader is struck by how severely intelligence had over-rated the Iraqi troops that waited there, and by how little our armor and infantry could have known of that until contact had been made. The opposite would have been calamitous.

Guardia teases out the humanity of these soldiers, together with a number of other fascinating threads that include the shifts of military technology that were taking place at the time (for example, in armored troop carriers and among the tanks themselves); the critical pivot-point of professional and disciplined small-unit leadership; and the powerful strategy and tactics that were brought to bear on Saddam’s challenge.

Not one of these themes has any element of ‘automatic’ in it. Each is the product of sustained effort in a single direction. Else Saddam might have stood.

This reviewer also appreciates the author’s description of how quickly and savagely the desert can turn from friend to foe, and how such bad turns can effectively incapacitate an otherwise overwhelming force.

A superbly well chosen collection of photos, together with the now obligatory piece (after Band of Brothers) here called ‘After the Storm’ that traces the lives and careers of soldiers come home, rounds out Fires of Babylon.

Four stars for a well informed and nicely told story that both illuminates and teaches, perhaps without the polished writing that would have earned it a fifth.