The Conspirator

An interesting twist to a Civil War story and the assassination of President Lincoln. The focus is on the conspirators: John Wilkes Booth,John Surratt

RottenTomatoes is not fond of it: The Conspirator is well cast and tells a worthy story, but many viewers will lack the patience for Redford's deliberate, stagebound approach. That might tell more about the audience that the film. It is not off the mark, either: the pace is deliberate, but the acting good. In this telling of the story, the military tribunal and Secretary of War Gideon Wells do not come off smelling too good.

Lord of War

Drek. Mierda. Shit. Had read about it in a New Yorker article ("Disarming Viktor Bout" by Nichols Schmidle, 5 March 2012 issue), so I tried it: BIG MISTAKE.

Ernie Pyle's story of G.I. Joe

In the February 13 & 20, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, David Denby wrote a side Critic's Notebook column: Soldiering On, in which he praised this film. He called it "probably the grimmest and most poetic and the least tied to genre clichés." Grim and freee of clichés it is, indeed; poetic I am not sure sure about, but I can understand what he meant.

"Sombre, slightly maddened, fatalistic," it follows a unit to which Ernie Pyle attaches himself, as it fights in North Africa, then Italy. There is little staged heroism, or any other clichéd action. The film catches the cruelty of war in both its random and fatal violence, and its endless boredom. Burgess Meredith seems miscast as Ernie Pyle, and does his best to rescue his effort. Robert Mitchum plays a lieutenant who handles his assignment (which includes sending men to their deaths) with a soft touch. A sergeant in the unit receives a 45rpm recording of his son's voice, but can not find a way to play it. When he finally finds a victrola, it has no needle. His attempt to fashion a replacement is not only futile but maddening: each time he tries to listen to it, the record plays at the wrong speed and his frustration builds and builds.

Interesting film-making. John Wayne stinks.

Tuskegee airmen

Rather good, even if a little labored.

General of the Army

After reading the H.W. Brands biography of FDR, I read Partners in Command, by Mark Perry. I was left with a feeling of not knowing enough about George Marshall, and sought out a biography. Ed Cray's book does justice to the man.

George Marshall was both ambitious and selfless, something of a contradiction of terms and characteristics. From and early age he wanted to be a soldier, and served in the military for nearly six decades. Command of fighting soldiers is what he always sought, and was nearly always denied, for he turned out to have an uncanny talent for administration and planning. Pershing became his mentor and model, Fox Conner his teacher. From them he learned how to command and how to devise military strategy. FDR would grow to rely on him, to such a degree that he could not abide letting him go to serve as field commander.

After serving as Chief of Staff during WW 2, GCM went to China on President Truman's behalf, to try and get the Nationalists and Communists to compromise and form a government of national unity. That would become the basis for McCarthy and others of his ilk to charge Marshall with treason, an idea so palpably absurd that only a fanatic could entertain its veracity. The China Lobby could and would not understand that it was Chaing Kai Shek who "lost" China, and found scapegoats in Truman and Marshall.

GCM also served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. It was his misfortune to have to deal with Douglas MacArthur for most of his life and career. Yet Marshall understood that MacArthur needed to be handled gingerly, and always figured out how to do so.

Cray does a magisterial job of tracing GCM's life and career. The book is also very well edited. It reads easily, for one interested in a sweep of 20th century US history.

A bridge too far

Film version of Cornelius Ryan's book. Cast includes Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and Edward Fox, as well as Elliot Gould, Laurence Olivier and Liv U. Not a happy story, but a good war movie.

Terrible Terry Allen

Having come across this book, and then across Allen's name, I thought this would be a wonderful book to read. Alas, it wasn't. I stopped, having skipped many pages. I found the writing style disagreeable.

Seven Days in May

1964 film about a rogue Air Force general who opposes the President's treaty with the Soviet Union, and puts in place a plan to overthrow the President and take power to save the nation. Burt Lancaster is cold and calculating, Kirk Douglas spry as his aide, Ava Gardner subdued as his mistress, Frederic March understated yet passionate as the President. Clichés eventually seep in, of course, but it remains a powerful film. I'd love top see it reprised

Hubris of a Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon

This review of the book Russia against Napoleon in the Times seems to take the same tack as the reviewer in the Journal (cf. post below) points out as being erroneous. This reviewer is John Steele Gordon. His history of the national debt, “Hamilton’s Blessing,” has just been released in a updated edition by Walker & Company.

In the Journal review, Jennifer Siegel states: In Mr. Lieven's eyes, this story has two great heroes, and neither is Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general lionized by Tolstoy and, later, Stalin. Mr. Lieven praises Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian forces, for his courage, skillful soldiering and mastery of public relations, but the author does not consider him the military genius that tradition has trained us to see. Rather it is the czar, Alexander I, and the historically undervalued Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, minister of war and the commander of the Russian forces before and after Kutuzov, who inspire Mr. Lieven's admiration.

In this review, Gordon states: With greatly inferior forces, Russia could not afford to confront Napoleon head on. Instead, the Russian commander, Mikhail Kutuzov, of necessity adopted Fabian tactics, harassing the invaders but avoiding pitched battle when possible. The one really big battle, Borodino, was more or less a draw, after Napoleon gave up personal command for reasons never satisfactorily explained. On Sept. 14 Moscow fell to Napoleon, and he sent peace overtures to Alexander, thinking the czar had no option but to negotiate. The Russians stalled and hinted but never gave a firm answer, seeking to keep Napoleon in Moscow as long as possible. On Oct. 19, with the czar still dawdling, French food supplies dwindling rapidly, and the Russian winter closing in, Napoleon had no choice but to begin withdrawal.

Kutuzov is painted as decisive, Alexander as indecisive. Stein sees it differently. Nonetheless, both  priase the book.

Moscow on the Seine

How a czar and his army saved Europe from France's Grande Armée.


After two years of nearly continuous fighting against Napoleon in the longest campaign in European history — a campaign that had marched the Russian army from Vilna in the west, eastward to Moscow, then all the way to Paris — the end to the conflict seemed for the first time to be as close at hand as the city rising on the horizon.

Dominic Lieven relates the tale of this campaign with masterly skill in "Russia Against Napoleon." It is a story that students of European history and admirers of Russian literary classics think they know well: Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 and stayed too long; was trapped by the Russian winter and stymied by the nationalistic heroism of the Russian people; destroyed his Grande Armée in an ill-timed retreat across the snow-covered, war-ravaged fields; and was slowly pushed back to Paris by the re-formed and newly invigorated coalition of Great Powers (Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia). In 1814, as every schoolchild once knew, Napoleon was dispatched to Elba, leaving open the possibility that Russia would dominate the recently liberated Continent.

Mr. Lieven, a professor of Russian history at the London School of Economics, paints a far more textured picture of Russia's crucial role in halting Napoleon's advance and containing France within its historic borders. "Russia Against Napoleon" is informed by Russian sources and focuses not only on Russia's oft-praised people but also on the country's oft-underappreciated leadership in the early 19th century.

In Mr. Lieven's eyes, this story has two great heroes, and neither is Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general lionized by Tolstoy and, later, Stalin. Mr. Lieven praises Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian forces, for his courage, skillful soldiering and mastery of public relations, but the author does not consider him the military genius that tradition has trained us to see. Rather it is the czar, Alexander I, and the historically undervalued Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, minister of war and the commander of the Russian forces before and after Kutuzov, who inspire Mr. Lieven's admiration.

Russia Against Napoleon   940.2709 L

Dominic Lieven
Viking, 618 pages, $35.95

Barclay de Tolly was responsible for Russia's successful strategy of "deep retreat," which he had recommended as early as 1810. The idea was to lure the French far into Russia's heartland, stretching out their supply lines and making a potential French retreat crippling and costly. He was under constant criticism in his day for abandoning Russian ground to the French in 1812 without any real resistance, and he was under perpetual suspicion from the "Old Russian" camp at court and in the army because of his "foreign origins"—even though his family, of Scottish descent, had lived in the Russian Empire since the mid-17th century. In Mr. Lieven's hands, Barclay de Tolly comes across as tireless, dedicated, brave and strategically sound.

And Czar Alexander, often portrayed as unpredictable and ungrounded, frequently shows good leadership and diplomatic finesse in Mr. Lieven's telling. Despite ... constraints, Alexander proved an effective wartime leader, particularly after 1812, when the conflict moved out of Russia and diplomacy became paramount. He recognized that only a peace signed in Paris could guarantee the restoration of order in Europe and the security of Russia; but he also saw that Russia alone could never defeat the French forces. A victory over Napoleon was possible only because Alexander managed to form a grand alliance and keep it intact. This coalition-building, Mr. Lieven argues, was the czar's greatest achievement.


Russia's triumph is also a story of logistics, supplies and, above all, the horse. The country's leaders mobilized what Mr. Lieven calls "the sinews of Russian power": its vast population (although much smaller than the combined numbers at Napoleon's disposal); its outstanding and plentiful horse stock; its arms manufacturing; and even the sometimes unstable Russian economy. Of these, it is the horse, and Russia's ability to mobilize its light cavalry to harass Napoleon's rearguard as it retreated across the great European plain, that receives the greatest attention in "Russia Against Napoleon." Coming in a close second to the horse in significance were the victuallers who managed to feed and supply more than a half-million troops during the two-year campaign.


Mr. Lieven ends by arguing that in 1814, as in the present day, the security of Russia and the security of Europe were interdependent. True enough, but he also shows in this absorbing book that the defeat of Napoleon hinged on the resources, leadership and sacrifice of the Russian empire.

Ms. Siegel is a history professor at Ohio State University.

Death Squad

Illustration by Paul Sahre and Jonas Beuchert; photograph from “Black Hearts

March 14, 2010 - Review by JOSHUA HAMMER

BLACK HEARTS One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death.
By Jim Frederick. Illustrated. 439 pp. Harmony Books. $26.

Of all the crimes that sullied the record of the United States military in Iraq — the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the killings of 24 Iraqi men, women and children by Marines in November 2005 in Haditha — the murder of an entire Iraqi family in the village of Yusufiya may rank as the most chilling. On March 12, 2006, United States soldiers were summoned to a small house in the heart of the insurgent-filled “Triangle of Death” south and west of Baghdad, where they discovered the charred remains of a 14-year-old girl who had been raped, shot to death, then burned with kerosene, along with the bodies of her 6-year-old sister and her parents. At first the killings were attributed to a feud between Iraqis, but after a soldier came forward with information he had gleaned from comrades, the Army arrested the real perpetrators: four soldiers from Bravo Company, a casualty-plagued unit in the Army’s First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Press attention centered on the group’s ringleader, Pvt. Steven Green from Midland, Tex., “a petulant loner and a hard-drinking druggie” according to Newsweek, who was afflicted by a “seething, seemingly random rage.” Despite Green’s repeated troubles with the law, he had easily enlisted in an Army hurting for recruits and breezed through basic training. Before his deployment, Green made no secret of his bloodlust, reportedly telling one neighbor, “I’m gonna go over there and kill ’em all.”

Jim Frederick’s “Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death,” is a riveting account of the crime and the events leading up to it. Frederick, a former Tokyo bureau chief for Time magazine, became curious about the case after learning that the platoon to which the killers belonged had been traumatized by another gruesome episode around the same time: the abduction, torture and murder of three men in their ranks by Iraqi insurgents. A short time after that, he received a phone call from an Army lawyer representing one of the accused, who described near-continuous violence, chain-of-command failures and the breakdown of discipline in Bravo Company’s theater of operations: “What that company is going through, it would turn your hair white,” he said. Frederick interviewed dozens of soldiers, followed courtroom proceedings and inspected documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The result is a narrative that combines elements of “In Cold Blood” and “Black Hawk Down” with a touch of “Apocalypse Now” as it builds toward its terrible climax.

Suddenly I was reminded of a film about US soldiers in Iraq, and couldn't think of it, at first. An OPAC search was inconclusive, so I went to my film blog, and there I found it: Redacted.

Frederick’s tale begins with the deployment of Bravo Company in the fall of 2005, when United States forces in Iraq were losing ground to the Sunni insurgency. Impressing the brigade commander with its combat readiness, the company was assigned to a 50-square-mile patch of villages and farmland south of Baghdad. “The terrain was perfect for guerrilla warfare,” Frederick writes, describing warrens of houses, 10-foot-high elephant grass and irrigation canals that “diced up the land like a maze.” Bravo’s mission was to keep insurgents out of the capital by seizing control of key highways and winning the hearts and minds of the local population. They set up shop in an abandoned potato processing plant, a “gigantic corrugated-tin barn” whose previous military occupants had left the place a shambles and provided a foretaste of the stresses that lay ahead. “Feces and other waste clogged the gutters. Discarded food, including slabs of meat, was welded by heat and sand to the floor of the chow hall, while other provisions rotted in open freezers.”

What im,pressed the brigade commander so much? How could commanders at all levels send their troops out into a landscape perfect for guerrilla warfare without adequate resources?

Thrown into the heartland of a growing insurgency, with undefined goals and a shortage of manpower, Bravo Company began piling up casualties at an alarming rate. An unassuming Iraqi man shot two of them dead at point-blank range at a stationary checkpoint; others were blown apart while searching for improved improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, on foot patrols. As the deaths mounted, the troops grew resentful of the superiors who sent them into hazardous missions without rest or proper equipment, and increasingly hostile to the Iraqis they were supposed to be winning over.

Undefined goals? Shortage of manpower? What did VP Cheney say? They'll throw flowers at us as liberators?

Frederick captures the terror of men who knew they could be blown up at any moment, and the way that fear soon metamorphosed into indiscriminate hatred. Describing the aftermath of an I.E.D. explosion, he writes: “There’s a man on a cellphone, a lady putting out some washing, a kid walking down the road, and you just cannot figure it. How can none of these people know anything about what just happened here? . . . How could you not want to kill them, too, for protecting the person who just tried to kill you?” Of the three platoons in Bravo Company, First suffered the most losses and had the hardest time coping. Some drank heavily and numbed themselves with drugs; they entertained one another by passing around video montages of corpses and battle kills: “One, with a title card dedicated to ‘Mr. Squishy Head’ — a dead body whose skull had been smashed in — was set to the track of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man.’ ”

Life imitating art?

Aside from the perpetrators, Frederick refrains from singling out villains, steeping his character portraits in ambiguity. The closest approximation of a bad guy is Lieut. Col. Tom Kunk, 47, whose “large, shiny, hairless dome earned him the unit-appropriate nickname of ‘the Bald Eagle.’ ” Publicly humiliating those who fell short of his standards, Kunk shrugged off complaints and singled out First Platoon for special abuse. Sgt. Jeff Fenlason restrained his soldiers’ impulses to lash out at Iraqis, but he rarely left the base and failed to notice how strung-out and desensitized to violence his men were becoming. Sgt. Anthony Yribe, the squad leader, “a walking, talking G.I. Joe action figure,” was a fearless soldier who exerted a magnetic hold on his men, but his ethical ­lapses and contempt for Iraqis seem to have percolated down the line. In one telling scene, he accidentally shoots to death an Iraqi woman at a checkpoint, then gives tacit approval to a cover-up; later he has to be stopped from summarily executing a 72-year-old Iraqi man who panics during a nighttime raid on his house and fires a pistol. After Green confesses to Yribe, the sergeant tells the killer to keep quiet and says nothing about the crime. (By contrast, Pfc. Justin Watt, who braved his comrades’ scorn and threats and went public with what he knew, emerges as one of the book’s few heroes.)

Nice man, that Lt. Col.

In the end, flawed leadership, bad luck and a virulent mix of personalities seem to have led inexorably to the horror of March 12. Just six months into their deployment, one sergeant told Frederick: “First Platoon had become insane. What does an infantry rifle platoon do? It destroys. That’s what it’s trained to do. Now . . . let slip the leash, and it becomes something monstrous.” Frederick’s extra­ordinary book is a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.

Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.

Stop-loss

Excellent. Powerful. Impressive.


I really liked this movie: the action was continuous and evocative, vigorous and compelling; the acting was superb.

Ryan Phillippe has quickly become a favorite: even his accent was good. Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, all were quite good, as was, in fact, all the cast.

Stop-loss refers to soldiers who are sent back to war after their tours of duty ended. The brutality of that, the impact of the life of a soldier, is demonstrated graphically. This is a major film, an important war film.

Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone, gave it 3.5 stars; I give it 4.