Customer Reviews

A Carrier At War: On Board the USS Kitty Hawk in the Iraq War

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

 

 

This slim volume is the author's travel log on how he spent his two week holiday aboard the Kitty Hawk. The first quarter of this double-spaced text is the author packing for his journey and multi-page reproductions of waivers, medical forms, and minutia. We do, finally, get aboard where we learn there is a pointy end of the ship and a round end. We meet a chaplain, a doctor, PR people, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. There is a flight deck somewhere above, but its noisy and dangerous so we don't bother with it too much. Its best moments are when we meet some great young homesick kids doing important work in a dangerous atmosphere for our benefit. They are great. But the author has other agendas. In this era of political divisiveness, there are imagined elements that need admonishment at every turn, and they get it. The author's background is twenty-five years as an investment banker where he learned "to never take notes" in fear of future litigation. (!) Since then, his passion is looking at the Civil War for signs of contemporary political leanings. The reason this review depicts the author is because that's what the narrative is primarily about. The story ends when the "at war" part of the book's title starts. When first approached by a quasi-new agency for this assignment, the author doubts his capability for this sort of thing. His instinct proves accurate.

Mr. Miller's book is well written and extremely interesting when he sticks to the carrier and its personnel. That's the good part. The Bad part is when he puts in a large plug for Hannity, Limbaugh, Fox News et al. He should stick to the carrier information, I really don't care to read his right wing garbage.
The Ugly part is when he decries the "politically connected contractors" getting contracts for Boston's Big Dig project. Of course, Boston is left wing, hence the poke at them. He, of course, does not mention Haliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq.
I still recommend the book based on the vivid description of the carrier and life aboard it. You can skip his political junk and just concentrate on the riveting carrier stuff.

An embedded reporter with a difference, in fact several differences. Mr. Miller went to the 2003 war in Iraq as an embedded reporter on board the Kitty Hawk. Some of the differences include: Age: 51 years; Occupation: Civil War Historian; Military Experience: None. And perhaps more important, attitude. He approached this war with an interrest in the influence of class, race, local community, ethnicity and religion on combat morale and unit cohesion. He is not looking for the Weapons of Mass Destruction, he is looking at the people.

The resulting book is different than the others that have been coming out of the Iraq war. Here he is concerned more with the average sailor than he is the big picture or how many bombs were being dropped. He writes as an observer, a keen observer of the human condition in a war time environment but away from the shooting (expect for a few discussions with some of the aircrew).

The book is written in diary or journal form, as befits a Civil War Historian where a lot of the material is written in that manner. It's a refreshing look at the Iraq war.

Miller is an out of touch biased older man. He views everything from a civil war perspective. He creates old/young, and race rifts as an excuse and overlying motivation for seemingly all actions aboard the carrier. This book is interesting as it gives occasional glimpses into carrier life, but it must constantly be decoded. Miller spends an inordinate amount of time smoking and glorifies himself for choosing to spend his time and research among 'his people' the enlisted crew, ignoring officers except for mealtime and arranged interviews. At one point, empathizing with the enlistees desire to get the war over with and return home he states his opinion that he too, after 2 weeks being coddled and sheltered, feels he has earned the right to want to go home. In short, he makes a big deal out of everything. I recommend this book (library only) to anyone over the age of 50 who has not ventured anywhere remotely dangerous. It was an interesting read, but one that left me angry and disgusted.

Richard F. Miller's A CARRIER AT WAR: ON BOARD THE USS KITTY HAWK IN THE IRAQ WAR isn't just another overview of military events, but a narrowed focus on individual officers, sailors and shipboard morale during a mission which paralleled the events leading to the Iraq War. The Kitty Hawk was one of the lead elements in the 'shock and awe' campaign: the author remained with the carrier through the hostilities and interviewed the ship's captain, chaplain, doctors, and more, even visiting the brig. His review of life aboard a carrier at war is vivid and personal.

I found the key to this book in the preface where the author, a noted Civil War historian, declares his intention to create a letter or diary format for recording the events which he suspects are about to unfold. In short, he wants to create a diary in which the stuff of daily life on board the USS Kitty Hawk is recorded before he (or anyone else) knows how the "story"--the invasion of Iraq--will end. As a result, this book is the stuff of true history--a valuable primary source. It has integrity because unlike other journalist accounts, which I suspect have trimmed away erroneous predictions of WMDs, or fears about the same which now look foolish in hindsight, or their early support for a war which is now widely believed to have been a mistake, Miller's account leaves this material in place--in short, providing a snapshot of life as it was actually experienced, not as we imagine (or would like to imagine it) now. Fortunately, Miller was not a journalist, and his account of an embedding process which remains controversial, is about as balanced as I've seen. And the inclusion of original embedding documents preserve a primary source which, if they still exist, probably won't for much longer. Future historians trying to figure out how the reporting went as it did will, or ought to be, indebted to this book.

I don't agree with Miller's politics, and unlike him, am not a religious person (for example, I don't understand his closing quotation taken from (I think) the Jewish Torah). And I'm not convinced of the spirituality of sailors to the extent that he apparently is. But none of that is the point. I consider this as an important primary source--the raw stuff of history.

This is not a book for readers who prefer their histories to be fairy tales, or mere stories, or neatly prepackaged narratives with lots of bang-bang (not that Saddam had much of a surface fleet to take on our Navy!)--but for an account of life aboard a warship, it has versimilitude. These days, that's worth five stars.