The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military

Walk with America's generals, grunts, and Green Berets through the maze of unconventional wars and unsettled peace.

Four-star generals who lead the military during wartime reign like proconsuls abroad in peacetime. Secretive Green Berets trained to hunt down terrorists are assigned to seduce ruthless authoritarian regimes. Pimply young soldiers taught to seize airstrips instead play mayor, detective, and social worker in a gung-ho but ill-fated attempt to rebuild a nation after the fighting stops.

The Mission is a boots-on-the-ground account of America's growing dependence on our military to manage world affairs, describing a clash of culture and purpose through the eyes of soldiers and officers themselves. With unparalleled access to all levels of the military, Dana Priest traveled to eighteen countries—including Uzbekistan, Colombia, Kosovo, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan—talking to generals, admirals, Special Forces A-teams, and infantry troops. Blending Ernie Pyle's worm's-eye view with David Halberstam's altitude, this book documents an historic and thought-provoking trend, one even more significant in the aftermath of September 11 as the country turns to its warriors to solve the complex international challenges ahead.

Walk with America's generals, grunts, and Green Berets through the maze of unconventional wars and unsettled peace.

The New Yorker

This absorbing survey argues that the State Department, because of a lack of funding, has, in the past decade, essentially handed over to the military the task of international relations. The "mission" of the title is vast, and ranges from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia to monitoring town-hall meetings in Kosovo. Priest profiles colorful regional commanders -- one sky-dives for relaxation; another practices falconry with the Saudi royals -- who operate abroad with astonishing latitude. On the ground with the Special Forces, she finds that their prodigious combat training has not prepared them for such difficulties as persuading rival Afghan tribes to live side by side, or fielding a request for sewing machines from a Serbian women's collective. If Priest's account, like her subject, is a bit overextended, she has a sharp sense of the nations who know America best not through diplomats but through soldiers -- as when she tells of the king of Swaziland remarking to an American captain, "I'd really like to meet your ambassador."

Dana Priest reports on military and intelligence issues for the Washington Post and is the recipient of the 2001 Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Defense Reporting. She lives in Washington, DC.