Customer Reviews

Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

When I heard that a book had been written about my ROTC unit during the time that I was a cadet, I was intrigued. I was also curious, how I never really knew that anyone was working on such a project, especially when I should have known. I was for all intents and purposes a cadet who was in the center of things within the unit, including its Cadet Battalion Commander in the fall of 2005. All I remember was reporter coming to a couple of our field exercises and taking pictures while hardly talking to anyone. David Axe's Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War is a biased and consistently inaccurate portrayal of the Gamecock Battalion during the time that I was cadet.

To start with, Army 101 is ripe with inaccuracies about the ROTC and the Army in general. Axe quotes graphic running cadences that I have never heard, and he talks about cadets using M60 machine guns in training at Fort Jackson. Not once do I recall having M60 machine guns on any field training exercise. He makes several attempts to interject cadet lingo, but gets it terribly wrong. For instance he mentions that the cadet in charge the Ranger Challenge team was referred to as the "Ranger Daddy." As a four year Ranger Challenge team member during the period covered in the book, not once do I remember that term being used seriously. My favorite thing is the contention that most of the Cadets belonged to fraternities or sororities. There were a few cadets who participated in Greek organizations, but as I recall most did not. In fact, I would argue that "frat guys" were looked down on amongst the cadets with a few notable exceptions.

I will admit that The Gamecock Battalion had its faults. I remember the old Sergeant that was sexually harassing the female cadets. The man was a pig. The thing is, he was exposed, and he got what was coming to him. I also readily admit that the training exercises were not precision examples of infantry tactics, but poorly orchestrated gaggles of people. The thing is, the real infantry soldiers conducting raids in Iraq started out learning how to patrol by walking in poorly orchestrated gaggles. Axe hints at this, and begins to make that point that ROTC uses infantry tactics as its training vehicle to teach leadership. The problem is that he doesn't emphasize it well. The point of those exercises literally was to see how the cadet leaders reacted when things went bad, and not to prepare them for conducting the perfect raid on an insurgent bomb making factory in Fallujah. New Lieutenants coming out of ROTC still have a great deal of full time training before they get sent out onto the battlefields.

Furthermore, Axe seems to have cherry-picked the cadets that he interviewed to back up his obvious anti-war and anti-Army bias. He for the most part bases his book the few cadets who failed, had doubts about the program, felt persecuted, were sub-standard, and or were not respected by the majority of the cadet battalion. I would not argue with wanting to present that side of the story if he had based his book on the majority of cadets. The majority of young men and women were there to learn how to be leaders so that they could simply go and serve their country.

My question is this, why wasn't I interviewed? Why weren't the majority of fellow cadets like me interviewed? The answer comes when I look up that the wall as I write this review. On the wall above my desk are the framed mementos of my time in ROTC. I look up and see my diplomas from Airborne School and Air Assault School. I see my Commission. I see the things that would in Axe's eyes, made me one of those "hardcore" cadets hell bent on getting to the "sandbox" so I could start killing savages. To him I would be a blood thirsty killer, because I was a "squared away" cadet, and not one of the minority of cadets with a chip on my shoulder. Thing is, if he had taken the time to ask me or the majority of my fellow cadets some questions he would have not been able to write this book the way he did. He would have had to write a story about young men and women who joined up to serve their country, have an adventure, be leaders, and do their part despite all the hardships. He would have to write a book about people who see that there is a job to be done, and they figure that it might as well be them leading in its completion. Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War was written about the University of South Carolina's Army ROTC, but it was not written about the USC Army ROTC that I served in, and led.

- 2LT Samuel T. Brown
United States Army, Aviation

Full disclosure: I am a serving Army officer, a product of ROTC, and OIF veteran. I'm no right-winger, didn't vote for Bush, and was glad to see Rumsfeld go. But I went into Army 101 thinking it would be a snapshot of ROTC, for better or for worse, and was unpleasantly surprised by the tone of this micro-novel and the half-truths I found on every page.

It was a very quick read, without any weighty intellectualism to slow me down as I tore through this nasty little book. Axe-- a writer for the Village Voice, no less-- finds a way to work his anti-war sentiment into every crevice of this book while simultaneously failing to accurately capture the spirit and motivation of the young men and women who are preparing to lead the next generation of American Soldiers. Axe skips out on the key notes-- the patriotism of these cadets, their desire to serve their country, regardless of our President or foreign policy-- and then dishonors them by highlighting their shortcomings and smears the more motivated amongst them with the typical catcalls of warmonger and babykiller, although couched in more contemporary terms. Other comments here suggest that he missed the more motivated and "squared-away" demographic of cadets, and I'm unsurprised that he found time to talk to the ones who couldn't hack it. Smart, motivated, successful young men and women who are eager to serve their nation and willing to face death in defense of their principles aren't the sort of thing that gets a lot of ink in the Village Voice.

I hate to use the term "agitprop", but I'm afraid this book is little more than that, and rather unexceptional agitprop indeed. Michael Moore writes books like this, only with better research, less obfuscation of his bias, and just as much ignorance.

Not worth the money in hardcover, and I doubt it will last the test of time. Skip this, or wait until a paperback copy lands in the free book bin of your local second-hand book store.

As a current ROTC Professor of Military Science, I was very excited to learn that a book had been written about Army ROTC. I ordered a couple of copies and I and the staff read on, hoping to incorporate the book into our Freshman course. I will say that the book is at least written at the high school / college freshman level, so it has that going for it (and that it can be read in a couple of hours). Unfortunately, Axe does a woeful job in accurately portraying a "Year in the Life" of an ROTC program, and too often intersperses expletive-laden descriptors as color commentary, and throws in the occasional Political-Military opinion into the mix, disrupting the flow of the narrative and turning off many readers in mid-stream.

This book did not do its theme and subjects great justice, and I hope a better book on the Reserve Officer's Training Course does surface in the near future - particularly in these times our nation deserves a better appreciation as to what its sons and daughters do to adequately prepare them to be junior leaders in this ever-changing Contemporary Operating Environment.

Really, go get the Bill Murray movie Stripes and watch it-- it's a better and more inspiring military story than this. I'm just amazed, from how this guy writes about not just our military stuff but ANY military stuff, that he didn't use the word "fascist" in there. You might as well listen to the song "Three Five Zero Zero" from the musical Hair instead from his take. (And, being an Army ROTC graduate who's gone through what the author wrote about in the book, I think he could've spent more time and gotten more unvarnished this-is-it material for a bigger/better book instead of just being negative.) If you think soldiers are suckers fighting in Iraq to increase Dick Cheney's portfolio with Haliburton, then this book is for you (be sure to get that 40th Anniversary edition of Jane Fonda's FTA with it too).

It's jarringly obvious that author David Axe didn't put a great amount of effort into his examination of Army ROTC. The book is alarmingly thin, barely a half dozen cadets seem to have been interviewed, and he clearly couldn't be bothered to do much research (as evidenced by bizarre belief that a certain NCO's combat patch indicates that he slaughtered Iraqis in Desert Storm or that it is a common occurrence for students at Airborne school to be dragged along the ground to their deaths by a parachute caught in a sudden gust of wind). Judging from the limited scope of the book, it seems that Axe got bored with his topic and decided to simply wrap it up and send it to a publisher. Or perhaps it was a magazine article that got out of hand.

Also problematic is Axe's insistence on making his negative feelings towards the military apparent on a regular basis. He is clearly uncomfortable with uniforms, weapons and authority figures and makes a point to greatly exaggerate the violent aspects of ROTC training. The fact is, ROTC makes a point of wearing "kid gloves" as often as possible so as not to scare off new cadets. Perhaps the program depicted was more gung-ho than average, but I doubt it. It's far more likely that Axe was expecting "Fullmetal Jacket Lite" and, rather than admit that he was incorrect, went searching for it.

But while Axe seems to have a weak grasp on the facts and distorted view of the military in general, he does pretty accurately depict the people within ROTC. Cadre are occasionally unprofessional and overbearing, but the majority of the NCOs and officers take their job seriously and are depicted doing so. Cadets are represented as the mixed bag that they are, with some eagerly soaking up the training, some restless and bored with it and others straining under authority and wondering what they got themselves into. What Axe captures best is the mixed influences that a civilian college lifestyle and military training have on cadets, brilliantly illustrated in the irreverent 5-paragraph operations order for a bar crawl. "Army 101" is an extremely shoddy piece of journalism but does serve a limited use in offering a look at the people that make up the future of the United States military.

This is a very good book for someone who would like a introduction to Army ROTC or any ROTC at that. Go inside the lives of several cadets as they sweat and cry their way towards their goal of being Army Officers.

The one thing I would have liked more was if it was longer. I felt this book was way to short and the author could have added a lot more. I also feel like there were empty spots in the book where more detail could have been.

I honestly don't understand the points of view of those rating this book with one star. Having gone through ROTC in a Pittsburgh college, I found his book very reminescent of my experiences, down to the amateurish ambush exercise to the "Advanced Camp" (mine was at Ft Bragg). This is a good book, short, but illuminating as to the ROTC culture in many universities, with the addition of the Iraqi conflict looming over them. This book is not intended to be an in-depth discussion of ROTC and its pros and cons, but rather a snapshot of the experiences of one class. I think David Axe has written this book well and I recommend it to both ROTC grads who want to smile at the stories and those wondering what it's all about.

Written by freelance journalist and war correspondent David Axe, Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War is a straight-talk look at the state of the modern Reserve Officers Training Corps, and the lives of the college students who participate in them - in effect, minoring in the military while pursuing degrees in other fields. Drawn largely extensive interviews with ROTC recruits, Army 101 touches on everything from nighttime training exercises to the procedures and jargon of the ROTC classroom to the annual Ranger Challenge, a.k.a. "the varsity sport of ROTC". Of special note is how the war in Iraq affects ROTC recruitment and graduates; deployment in Iraq is sometimes even used as a punishment for egregious offences. "In 2004, when the situation in Iraq begins to turn south and the media start asking questions, Cadet Command issues 'public affairs guidance' to all ROTC units. The twenty-eight-page document advises cadets and cadre to be wary of reporters and even provides stock responses to potential questions [such as] Q: Should the US have taken military action against Iraq? A: Our national leaders must decide the question of whether or not the US should take military action. It would clearly be inappropriate of me to attempt to second-guess them." An unbiased, insightful look into the trials and challenges facing America's "civilian soldiers", especially recommended for anyone considering joining the ROTC.