A study in resilience: Book chronicles struggles, humanity of Army unit - Book Reviews: Entertainment for the Marine Corps - Marine Corps Times

A study in resilience: Book chronicles struggles, humanity of Army unit

The military reader might be skeptical about this book’s claim that Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, was the “hardest hit unit” in Iraq.

But halfway through the book — which is a fast read, and that is a compliment — the subtitle seems appropriate, and perhaps even an understatement.

The young men of Charlie Company experience so much mental and physical trauma that by Chapter 19, titled “Charlie Company Faces Its Worst Day,” it is baffling, dismaying and saddening to imagine that the soldiers are about to go through worse things than those in the previous 18 chapters.

But they do.

The company “knew they were part of the ‘surge’ and had heard the term ‘counterinsurgency,’ but many of the guys believed the two words were interchangeable without understanding the philosophy behind the new counterinsurgency manual written by Gen. David Petraeus and his aides,” the book states.

“In fact, they did not know the manual existed.”

They earned their knowledge the old-fashioned way, at a combat outpost in the Adhamiya section of Baghdad. After their first two comrades were killed, one by a sniper and one by a roadside bomb, nearly all responded the same:

“They froze up, became numb. It wasn’t necessarily intentional; it was more like their bodies and minds reacted in a way that allowed them to continue to try to survive.”

The surge strains sanity.

By the end of the company’s extended, 15-month tour:

• A respected first sergeant pulls the trigger of an M4 — on himself. He “might have shot himself,” acknowledges 1st Sgt. Kenneth Hendrix, “but he didn’t kill himself. Iraq killed him.”

• Pvt. Ross McGinnis throws himself on a grenade pitched by a 15-year-old Iraqi boy who gets $50 from the insurgents for his toss. McGinnis is awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.

• A platoon, confused by stress and sleep medication, refuses a platoon sergeant’s request for volunteers, and there’s a perception of mutiny.

Later, Hendrix admits he understands the men’s distress and does not want to “lose any more soldiers in three months in the same s—hole.”

The book is based on a series of stories published in Military Times that were written by senior staff writer Kelly Kennedy, a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the U.S. mission in Somalia.

She documents Charlie Company’s Iraq tour with numbers:

“In 15 months, 31 men of the 1-26 were killed and 122 wounded, making it the hardest-hit battalion since the Vietnam War. Charlie Company suffered the most, with 14 men killed. Second Platoon lost nine men.”

Kennedy documents with compassion, too.

Weeks before the “worst” day, former company commander Capt. Mike Baka asks headquarters to pull Charlie Company out of Adhamiya. No, he is told. “Your men are doing an outstanding job.”

Baka knows that, and he knows that psychologically, the men cannot lose more friends.

He doesn’t know they are about to suffer more. Ahead is June 21, 2007:

A Bradley rolls “over a deep-buried [improvised explosive device] so big that it left a hole the size of a Humvee in the ground” and flips, “landing in a swamp of gasoline as the tank emptied itself, adding fuel to the fire.” Five soldiers and an interpreter are killed in the blast. Then, a rocket-propelled grenade hits a Humvee, killing another soldier. Another IED catches a truck carrying the chaplain to the scene.

In the aftermath, “the medics carried their fallen brothers out to the helipad at nightfall for the Honor Flight back to the Green Zone ...

“Some soldiers talked, saying ‘I love you,’ one last time.

“Some laid their hands on the [body] bags, needing one last touch. Some cried.

“They loaded their dead into the helicopter in the growing darkness, and then the soldiers wrapped their arms around each other as they watched the bird lift off, carrying their friends into the sky.”

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Huffman is a Military Times book reviewer.