A Middle-Management View of the War

BAGHDAD AT SUNRISE

A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq

By Peter R. Mansoor

Yale University. 376 pp. $28

In early summer 2003, more than two decades into his Army career, the top-ranked officer from West Point's Class of 1982 went to war for the first time. In Iraq, Col. Peter R. Mansoor assumed command of a 3,500-member brigade fighting a burgeoning insurgency. But it was soon clear that he and his troops were part of an army, and for that matter a nation, that hadn't truly acknowledged it was at war.

Memoirs of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan come mostly in two varieties. The first group is made up of ground-level accounts by privates, sergeants and lieutenants; the second consists of score-settling books by retired generals and government officials. Mansoor's unflinching new account, "Baghdad at Sunrise," is neither. It is nearly unique, because his position was rare among military memoirists.

An Army colonel is the highest-ranking officer many soldiers will ever meet. He is entrusted with their leadership -- and their lives. (During his year-long tour, 24 of Mansoor's soldiers died, and he is careful to mention each.) But stripped of its martial dignity and veneer, Mansoor's account reveals the colonel's role as a middle manager. He tells the story of that fateful first year of the Iraq war from the point of view of one who saw decisions being made at the highest echelons, yet led soldiers in executing those orders day by day.

This is a serious book for a serious audience. Mansoor's style is restrained, and he seems to pull his rhetorical punches at times. Take troop levels: A rule of thumb, he explains dispassionately, is that a successful counterinsurgency requires about one soldier for every 50 civilians, while his brigade had one soldier for every 600. In addition, he writes, "the coalition lacked more than troops in Iraq. It lacked imagination and insight." To his credit, Mansoor takes some blame, admitting that he backed tactics that were "probably the wrong call," such as moving soldiers into large protected bases away from cities. And he acknowledges that at times he made only "a weak entreaty" to his superiors when he should have protested more fiercely.

On other occasions, it seems, he did rail as strongly as he dared against such "ad hockery" as the constant shifting of units in Anbar province, which was the heart of Sunni power and the base of the budding insurgency from 2003 to 2004. When the first of his soldiers was killed while protecting a glorified wax museum, the colonel's complaints led to a change in a standing order, issued in haste after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, to post American guards at all museums. Later, when Mansoor loudly objected to a draft order from the general he worked for, he was "nearly kicked out of the room." But it paid off when it became clear that the general's staff never ran the order by their boss.

These incidents give us a realistic portrayal of what it's like to be a middle manager picking which bureaucratic battles to fight, and knowing that your choices may have life or death consequences.

Mansoor's account is based primarily on a daily diary he kept of his experiences, and while this contributes to the depth of detail, it chains the narrative to a chronological structure. The reader would gladly grant Mansoor license to offer more analysis, especially as we know that he served a second tour in Iraq from 2007 to 2008 as Gen. David Petraeus's executive officer, implementing strategy very different from the first-year one described here; he tells us nothing about this second, arguably much more important, tour. And, although Mansoor recently retired from the Army, his prose still veers into milspeak. By the time "N Troop, 4th Squadron, 2nd ACR crosse[s] the line of departure and conduct[s] a zone reconnaissance toward Fallujah," for example, "followed at 5:45 a.m. by Comanche Troop, 1st Squadron, 2nd ACR, and Fantom Troop, 1st Cavalry (the brigade reconnaissance troops)," the first casualty is likely to be civilian attention. When Mansoor finally cuts loose in the final chapter, he speaks with intellectual rigor and stylistic vigor. He advocates specific changes in Army personnel systems -- adjustments in the way officers are assigned and promoted, for example -- and does so with I-lived-this credibility.

Near the end of the book, Mansoor describes meeting a mother and her high school-age son at a cocktail reception on Manhattan's Upper East Side. When he suggested that the young man might consider applying to West Point, the mother visibly recoiled. Mansoor takes this incident as a reflection of a potential "crisis in civil-military relations." The United States, he writes, "is the most powerful nation on earth, but that power can be realized only if Americans work together toward common goals and make the sacrifices necessary to achieve them." When we send our sons and daughters to serve in the military, however, we owe them leaders who are devoted to their well-being and the accomplishment of their mission. As Mansoor demonstrates time and again in his book, military leaders have other, competing concerns: devotion to the military as an institution, extreme deference to their superiors and the scourge of all great organizations, careerism. Though she might not have articulated it well, one can imagine the mother responding to Mansoor by objecting that the Army has not shown that it is led by men and women who clamor internally for necessary change, who respect the chain of command by passing along unwelcome truths and who are willing to risk their careers in the process.

Mansoor deserves kudos for candor, but he is no radical. The changes he advocates are real yet incremental. And as a retired officer, he may offer suggestions, but he now has something else in common with the woman at the Manhattan cocktail party: He is offering his comments from the outside.