Customer Reviews

Lightning in the Storm: The 101st Air Assault Division Inthe Gulf War

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First off, this book stands alone as a work of excellence. What it is describing is the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division of the U.S. Army; its true to its subject matter--if the reader is bored or cannot understand its on him to ask himself if its he that is lacking in skill/understanding or the 101st is boring--which is highly doubtful. Second, books are not in a zero-sum competition with each other. There is no rule that says if I rate this book "5 stars" (which I do) another must be "4". What Col Taylor's book does is priceless--it describes the "Screaming Eagles" in Desert Storm better than any other book. Now I will explain why.

To the serious student of warfare Taylor explains candidly why the 101st has been left out of Small Scale Contingency operations like Panama because its helicopters use up too much fuel and cannot fly far and fast enough to get there compared to the 82d Airborne Division which airdrops from fixed-wing USAF aircraft. The 101st's helicopters have to be disassembled and placed inside USAF fixed-wing aircraft or shrink-wrapped and placed on slow-moving ships to "get there". For a good comparison of the pros/cons of America's infantry, I highly recommend Col Dan Bolger's Death Ground: America's Infantry in battle, which echoes Taylor's observations. The Division, tired of being "orphaned" went on a strategic lift diet and cut out as many ground vehicles as possible to speed their mobilization. This is not some remote experience---the problem of getting U.S. Army forces with 3-D maneuver capabilities to the battlefield are as current as TF Hawk's woes were in Albania. For Desert Storm, the crafty planners at Fort Campbell were ready, and their foresight resulted in their AH-64A Apaches leading the way for the entire war by destroying key Iraqi radars. We need to employ the same thinking-ahead mentality today.

The next learning point for the war student is the fuel logistics---this may be boring to a reader wanting a RAMBO story, but this demanded that a ground supply line of trucks be used to link-up with the 101st as it bounded forward into operating bases deep into Iraq. If you read this book for the details and to see how the leaders overcame the obstacles of fuel, weather and terrain to position themselves at the "back door" of the Iraqi retreat you would be reinspired to the creativity and humanity of the men in this great Division. What strikes up at you when you read this book is that once at Highway 9, the 101st lacked enough mobile infantry to keep that route closed to enemy escape, the tactic chosen was to use Apache gunships flying free to detect/attack from stand-offs targets of opportunity as the infantry basically secured the fuel dumps for the attack helicopters. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, its clear that had the "Screaming Eagle" Infantry been equipped with light Armored Fighting Vehicles like the German Airborne's Wiesels, massive amounts of fuel to use helicopters randomly could have been avoided by using this now mobile, "Air-Mech" infantry to deliberately/precisely close the ground routes out of Kuwait from the Iraqi Army. The third and "achilles heel" of the 101st is its foot-mobile-constrained infantry; and for this problem, the leaders came up short in Desert Storm because to fix it requires a new type of ground vehicle to be obtained as the Russian Airborne figured out long ago.

Overall, this book is entertaining and a very important document since it details procedures like how 2 HMMWVs were loaded INSIDE a CH-47D Chinook helicopter to effect more fuel-efficient and speedy travel. That these HMMWVs were not used as infantry carriers as a sort of "rat patrol", creating an "Air-Motorized" force is a question but one that is easily answered as noone wanted to take any risks on the ground with unarmored vehicles that may get Americans killed, though Army SOF did it to hunt for SCUD missiles farther west behind Iraqi lines. This makes it all the more important that the 101st acquire a small UH-60L helicopter-transportable AFV immediately so the next time we need "lightning" the voltage doesn't fizzle when it touches the ground.

Taylor has written a fine book, but a book almost written for insiders of the 101st Airborne Divison (which Taylor is). I am fortunate to have served with the Screaming Eagles and therefore have the insider's knowledge of how the division operates. Without this first hand experience, I think I would have been lost reading this book. Taylor also spends a great deal of time with the aviation units of the division and scant little time telling the reader how all the division's units deployed, trained and fought the war. This is particularly true about the infantry (but in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I am an infantryman and so I'm baised).

This is a history of the 101st Airborne Division's role in the Gulf War.
It starts off by being incredibly schmaltzy. The author writes about his father, "My father wore the [division Screaming Eagle shoulder patch in WWII....] [O]nly the Screaming Eagle is engraved on his headstone, as it had been on his heart. I'd worn it in the jungle where it seemed a talisman and inspiration."
He goes on to describe incidents like one battalion commander publicly promising to his unit's families, "I'm going to bring every guy back alive ... every one of your husbands ... will come back alive." Is this a war or a camping trip? The schmaltz continues after the war as five division deaths are lamented. "Five from the ill-fated crew had settled all accounts on this earth.... We had been so fearful there would be many, many more. We had to be grateful.... But it was a guilty gratitude."
More serious problems in this long 440-page book include failing to put events in perspective. The author brings in many anecdotes, often in the form of lengthy quotes from soldiers he interviewed for the book, without letting the reader in on the secret of what this soldier's role was, what the unit was doing, why the unit was doing it, etc.
Not only is the author's writing style disjointed, but the author cannot get his tenses straight. He usually writes of these past events in the past tense, but then lapses into current tense, and even into future tense on occasion.
I enjoy the genre, but this particular book is a definite pass.

As a member of the 101st Airborne Division,I was really looking forward to reading this book. I wanted to get some sort of insight into how the soldiers fought this war. The book focused entirely too much on the officers and 1/101st. I work in aviation & I know that there can't be too much that's interesting about that branch. What about the NCOs and enlisted guys that made everything happen? That's who the author should ave focused on. It took me months to finish reading this book, primarily because of the poorly written content. Don't waste your money on this piece of "literature."