The initial impression the author gave me was that he is a loser, a stereotypical no-hoper who hasn't ever worked hard in his life and had to cheat on the drug test to get into the army. As I read, my estimation of him improved, he is actually quite intelligent, well-read, and not a bad writer.
The book is a product of Colby's blog, which he started while deployed in Iraq (despite thinking blogging was 'nerdy'). It became incredibly famous as a no-holds-barred unofficial account of the war from someone who was living it.
Unfortunately as a book, it still feels very bloggy. It is a mostly factual account of 'we went here, this happened', and except for the early part of the book, has little reflection from Colby.
It was interesting reading this after the Accidental Guerrilla, because I read first hand about how ineffective the US was in Iraq. I was amazed to read about soldiers playing Playstations on their big screen TVs (bought from the PX) in air-conditioned shipping containers on the Forward Operating Base (FOB), then rolling out in armoured Strykers for search-and-destroy missions. They were completely ineffective at stopping insurgents from mortaring the base every single day:
we didn't catch a single one of those mortarmen in the act of mortaring our FOB the entire time we were there.
2.5 stars.
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