"Well worth reading"

As an embedded journalist with the 101st Airborne ("Band of Brothers" fame), Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent and military historian Richard Atkinson provides a deep look at the Iraq War from the perspective of the American troops. Though the concentration is more on the field grade officers, no one seems to have been left out of this effort. Readers learn how the soldier sees things whether it is equipment and supply shortages or overages (sounds contradictory, but is a big concern) or the individual and group safety in a hostile environs. Mr. Atkinson furbishes insight from the moment the division is called up to leave Fort Campbell to deploy to the desert until the capture of Baghdad when the author returns to the states.

Military history buffs will realize that the author salutes the army for their superb efforts to win a war while fighting nature and preventing civilian casualties though not all went well. IN THE COMPANY OF SOLDIERS: A CHRONICLE OF COMBAT is clearly anti this war yet fully supportive of the soldiers that the books raves about as courageous, sincere, and capable. Mr. Atkinson condemns the administration for lack of logistical planning and for its rationale for armed combat (being revised by the winners to we did right removing an abusive dictator; if that was the cause then the administration should have taken that thesis to the American people). Rumsfeld bashing aside, Mr. Atkinson clearly congratulates the deserving 101st with a twenty-one gun salute.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted March 28, 2004

Summary

From Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Rick Atkinson comes an eyewitness account of the war against Iraq and a vivid portrait of a remarkable group of soldiers 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. Atkinson watches Petraeus wrestle with innumerable tactical conundrums and direct several intense firefights; he watches him teach, goad, and lead his troops and his subordinate commanders. 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, the premier military historian of his generation puts us right on the battlefield. In the Company of Soldiers is a compelling, utterly fresh view of the modern American soldier in action.