United States Army - Regimental Histories, United States Army, Armed Forces - United States - Regimental Histories - General & Miscellaneous, 20th Century American History - Persian Gulf War, Persian Gulf War, 1991

Company C

Name: Company C
Author: John Sack
ISBN: 9780688112813

by John Sack

Write a review

Overview

Call it the Television War. For six weeks in 1991, images of the war in Iraq danced on America's TV sets, and we were led to believe that the GIs fought it by sitting at computer monitors and firing missiles at the Iraqis far, far away. It was a new kind of war, mudless and bloodless - a videogame war. Do not believe it. The real war in Iraq was as hellish as anything in The Red Badge of Courage or The Naked and the Dead - the GIs were wet and cold, uncertain and scared, and yet, through it all, courageous and compassionate, but TV wasn't there to report it. John Sack was with the GIs throughout the war. In America, he lived with the soldiers of Company C as they trained for D-Day in Iraq. He was with them in their homes, their churches, their drinking, dancing, and stripper clubs, and he was still with them as they invaded Iraq in sixty-ton tanks. He was with them at the biggest tank battle in American history - the only reporter who was. But in Company C John Sack doesn't write about himself or of units, munitions, and tactics, the alphabet soup that other war stories drown in. He writes of people, of boys in their teens and twenties who knew they might die (and, almost as bad, might kill), and became men in one hundred wild, hair-raising hours.

Transported from America's heartland to a desert on the far side of the world--young men, barely out of their teens, rolling across foreign sands in 60-ton war machines. The soldiers of Company C knew the enemy was waiting just over the next rise, where, if Saddam's artillery didn't get you, perhaps your own guns would. From the author of M.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Sack (M) here chronicles the unguarded words of several members of a 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) armored company as they wind up their training at Ft. Riley, Kansas, and are airlifted to Saudi Arabia to participate in Operation Desert Storm. From 135 hours of tapes, 575 pages of typewritten transcripts and 950 pages of handwritten notes, he has meticulously reconstructed a block of time, a cast of characters and a series of actions conveying in documentary fashion what it is like to go to war as a modern American soldier. The young men in these pages are keyed up-a condition heightened by Sack's ever-present tape recorder and notepad; but the mood turns solemn when Company C joins in the largest tank battle in American history, the Battle of Al Qarnain on Feb. 27, 1991. Sack conveys how the stress of combat affects each of his characters in turn, and he has a sharp eye for the unpredictable flourishes of war-the weeping colonel who calls himself an angel of death, the young tank driver who deliberately runs over an Iraqi and pronounces the experience ``awesome.'' (May)

Library Journal

As he did in an earlier book and on another war (M, 1967), Sack follows a unit of the U.S. Army from stateside to overseas deployment and into combat. He lets the men of C. Company/2nd. Battalion/34th Armor of the 1st Infantry Div. (Mech) tell their stories in their own words through transcriptions of taped conversations interspersed with some narrative. The result is a portrait of the Gulf War as seen from inside an Abrams tank. Sack, a former war correspondent and now an author and magazine contributor, shows that the character of war has not changed. For the reader, this account provides a contrast to works about the conduct of the Gulf War at higher levels. Because the story is told chronologically, Sack is constantly switching from one narrative thread to another, which may confuse the reader. There is no analysis or sense of the "big picture" here, simply a group of soldiers who go to war to do their job (for the most part) and go home. For both general and specialized military collections.-John F. Camenga, Tampa-Hillsborough P.L., Fla.

Roland Green

Sack got about as far to the front in the Gulf War as any journalist. Out of his sojourn with C Company, Second Battalion, Thirty-fourth Armored Regiment in the First Brigade of the First Infantry Division, he has fashioned a somewhat amorphous but compelling book. He focuses on the soldiers, and this focus together with his nonlinear style (which some may feel has not worn well since the 1960s) make the book only marginally useful as a study of the war yet invaluable for its concern with its warriors, especially the sons and daughters of America's unprivileged who--black, brown, white, red, yellow--put on army green and participated in one of the greatest fighting forces the U.S. has put into the field. As a collection of enormously vivid personal sketches, it belongs on any Gulf War shelf.