Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War.

A preponderance of analysis of the Persian Gulf War has focused on Norman Schwarzkopf: an important figure in that conflict, of course, but one who was utterly uninvolved in its actual fighting. Schwarzkopf experienced the Gulf War from an air-conditioned office building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, not being present with any ground unit in combat. (This is standard for a theater commander; Eisenhower wasn't at D-Day, either.) The generals who actually prosecuted the war, such as Barry McCaffrey of the Army, leader of the unit that executed the "left hook" into Iraq, and Charles Horner, who ran the air campaign, have strangely gone unnoticed in the public eye.

Or maybe not so strangely, given how superficially the U.S. media continue to cover military affairs. Schwarzkopf became a press fixation because he looks like a general, says pithy things, and appeared at numerous press conferences in air-conditioned buildings, where he could be photographed conveniently. McCaffrey, on the other hand, had to be tracked down by reporters--a few did, to their credit--while Horner, whose looks suggest your high school wood shop teacher, appears so unlike the stereotype of a general that most journalists would have walked right past him in the hall. It's now almost four years after the war, and the public has heard in mind-numbing detail about the bickering among Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, George Bush's senior staff, and Congress--but precious lettle about what actually happened to the men and women who fought.

Prodigal Soldiers is among the first books to cover this ground. It concerns the military careers of McCaffrey, Horner, former Tactical Air Command leader Wilbur Creech, former Army Chief of Staff Edward Meyer, and others either involved personally or by influence in the Persian Gulf fighting. By James Kitfield, a longtime military correspondent, Prodigal Soldiers is somewhat top-heavy: All its major subjects are flag-rank officers except for McCaffrey's son, Sean, who also fought in the Gulf. The grunts' view of the Gulf War remains to be written. Nevertheless, Prodigal Soldiers is a solid, admirable work and a welcome change from the big-deal, Washington-based approach to war reporting. Kitfield understands well that what happens in little-known training exercises, in military staff colleges and, most of all, in the personal combat experiences in the early careers of the soldiers who later become generals has far more effect on the ways in which war is fought than all White House statements, think-tank studies and similar Washington paperwork combined.

Kitfield relates, for example, McCaffrey's brush with death as a lieutenant in the early years of the Vietnam War. His squad was sent out with a battalion of Vietnamese paratroopers during the days when the official line was that the North Vietnamese were not an effective fighting force. Owing to this wishful thinking, McCaffrey's group was ordered much farther into opposition territory than good sense would dictate. They were surrounded by a larger force and, through a night's fighting during which bad weather prevented air support, more than a third of the American men died. When dawn came the survivors were horrified to discover that the North Vietnamese had not stolen off at first light--a common tactic for guerrillas--but remained in place and were being reinforced, meaning they intended to press the attack and destroy the surrounded battalion.

McCaffrey was further chilled to discover the Vietnamese paratroopers around him removing their helmets and donning the ceremonial red berets of their unit. Their captain was forming up his battalion to charge the larger force, knowing this to be suicide. The captain told McCaffrey that death was now inevitable, so might as well come on their own terms. Already wounded, McCaffrey joined the mad charge, which was rescued from oblivion only when an Air Force "Magic Dragon" gunship floated down as if by sorcery from the low clouds and caught the North Vietnamese force immoderately crossing an open field in hopes of staging a slaughter. McCaffrey, whose recovery took months, learned several lessons--about the foolishness of underestimating an enemy for political reasons, about the fact that Third World nations can produce distressingly effective armies, and about overconfidence in air power that may not be on target when needed.

Next, Kitfield tells readers of Horner's early Vietnam experiences. Early in the bombing campaign, he and a small group of fighter pilots were sent on a special mission to attack a missile site. Planning was poor, rearechelon officers assumed total success owing to the official line that the North Vietnamese were no threat, and for political reasons Horner's group was far too small and lightly armed for its own protection. Several of the fighters were shot down, the pilots killed or captured; Lyndon Johnson ended up on national television trying to rationalize a failed raid. Horner learned the basic military lesson of Vietnam: Either go strong or don't go at all.

After its Vietnam chapters, Prodigal Soldiers covers other formative events in the careers of the officers who ended up leading the U.S. army into Desert Storm--the disasters at Beirut and Desert One; the breakdown of cost-is-no-object weapons programs of the early eighties; the attempt during the Air Force's Red Flag exercises and similar undertakings to make military training realistic; the 1986 Joint Chiefs of Staff reform that shortened command lines and imposed accountability. These, Kitfield shows, forged what was by the time of the Persian Gulf conflict a senior Pentagon staff more attuned to the real-world aspects of war than any U.S. military leadership since the World War II Pentagon (post-Coral Sea).

Kitfield is right about this, and right to emphasize it. Because popular attention has focused so tightly on minor aspects of the Gulf War such as Schwarzkopf's personality, how constructive self-criticism within the U.S. military helped prepare that institution for success both in battle and in the moral behavior of troops remains the most important story of that conflict--and one that is still nearly unknown to the American public.

My first quibble with Kitfield is that he dismisses the constructive efforts in this regard of the military reform movement, one of whose voices was this magazine. For instance, he says that the fiasco of the ineffective Divad anti-aircraft gun was discovered by "congressional investigators." As someone intimately involved in that case, I can attest that congressional investigators arrived on the scene only after the groundwork had been done by journalists and an internal Pentagon analysis bureau. It's true that internally generated pressure within the officer corps was the most important factor in the eighties' military reform, but the public pressure generated by the highly visible civilian aspect of the reform movement helped spur the Pentagon brass and Congress (which enacted the JCS reform) into gear. I don't think it is exaggerating to say that in the eighties criticisms leveled by military reformers saved some U.S. lives in the Gulf. My second quibble is that Kitfield recounts many scenes in the novelized "you are there" format that leaves readers totally in the dark about his sources. Interviews? Other books? Was he there? Even the book's notes section leaves the source authority unclear, which is worrisome, regardless of whether the scenes ring true. (They do.)

Near the end of Kitfield's book is a poignant paragraph on Sean McCaffrey: "In Sean's few years in the Army, his division had parachuted into combat in Panama and gone to war in Desert Storm, and the boy had been stationed as part of a peacekeeping force in the Sinai. Somalia and Bosnia and Korea beckoned. The chances that Sean would be asked to put himself into harm's way were increasing. Truly, [General McCaffrey's] son was now the prodigal soldier." American soldiers, scorned by American intellectuals and rejected by popular culture in much of the post-Vietnam era, continue to be asked to surrender their lives in enterprises both wise and foolhardy. It's time we knew this group of people better.