Book Review of Chasing Alexander by Christopher Martin

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A good book to read, but very tricky to honestly review without annoying anybody. I was invited to review this book, so here goes:

The only commissioned officer to get a good press in this memoir of the author’s service in the USMC in both Iraq and Afghanistan is... Alexander the Great. And even then the author is not uncritical of Alexander’s later excursions into social engineering. Even senior NCOs (“Senior Enlisted” in USMC parlance) come across as a sort of alien species. Whereas Spike Milligan wrote of British Army Sergeant-Majors (in a letter to The Guardian): “just one of them could win you a war” Christopher Martin finds their 21^st Century USMC equivalents to be obsessed with trivia when vital issues, such as food and ammunition supply, or fire support from an armoured convoy ideally placed to provide this, which chooses not to give it, are being willfully neglected.

The author joins the USMC to discover and perhaps prove, himself. This is fortunate, because he has to take the initiative throughout his service to make up for what seems to be a void in the leadership he is offered. As a lance corporal the author becomes part of an electronic network which allows him to request, without reference to higher authority, mortar, artillery and air strikes of great destructive power. Yet communication across that network between those giving orders and those who know the realities on the ground and what the most basic needs are, proves to be indirect and almost completely unidirectional. High authority can convey its orders to the lance-corporal, who cannot make any of his needs or observations known to anybody not in his own line of sight.

On his way to his Afghan deployment in Marjah (and I write as one Afghan city after another falls to the Taliban, who are newly blessed by CCP President Xi) the author sees marines at a staging post in Central Asia, who seem dirty, ragged, emaciated and mentally and physically exhausted. He wonders if he will be in the same state in a few months time -and, spoiler alert, he and his surviving comrades do leave Afghanistan in just that kind of state. For almost the whole of their tour, they have nothing to eat except MRE and snacks: not even substantial junk food. In consequence the author more or less stops eating and lives off coffee and cigarettes, which cannot have helped his fragile mental state. (He is unsparing in his portrayal of his own mental state.

MREs are designed to keep a soldier in the fight for two or three weeks in the absence of better food. They are not able to keep a man truly healthy for as long as a month, let alone a tour, and no amount of positive thinking or propaganda will alter this. MREs are the only substantial food available at the author’s duty station during his tour (except for some steaks that arrive on the USMC’s birthday) and it’s quite obvious that this was also the case during preceding tours in the same location by other units. No commissioned officer ever spends more than a hour or so at the location (even as the seasons turn), so that commissioned officers as a class have no eyes on the problems and no knowledge of them, but they alone have the power to change things. That officers have a monopoly on the power of change is the reason why the Royal Marines and British Army expect lieutenants to be omnipresent, but the USMC seems to make no such demand(?!)

It is also the case that the USMC sets great store by the ability of its enlisted men to carry out astonishing feats of endurance and physical exertion. Scientific research conducted on super-athletes engaging in extreme sports has shown that even the best-tuned human body can do this sort of thing for only forty-eight hours. It simply isn’t possible for a man performing at his physical limits to absorb enough nourishment to keep doing it for any longer without collapse. And yet there will be those who hold that any marine who’s driven beyond those limits somehow wasn’t man enough to cope. It’s a superman mentality which is doomed to foster failure when exposed to reality.

You have to recognise that the exceptional is just that, and save it up for when it actually stands a chance of affecting the ultimate outcome of a conflict or indeed any other issue. To stubbornly demand that your men be exceptional the whole time actually guarantees that they will be physically and mentally exhausted at the golden moment when a supreme effort could have bought results. The Chinese believe in the golden moment, which is precisely why they are suddenly openly backing the Taliban, right now!

And yet, I left in awe of the American men who managed to survive, if not always surmount, the piles of difficulties they were presented with, at least half of which might have been avoided by better organisation and more bi-directional communication between the Elite and the Grunts. Someone needs to translate “By Strength and Guile” into Latin, so that America’s Elite might understand. At the moment they apparently believe that strength is a complete answer by itself.

Chasing Alexander by Christopher Martin is published by Notional Books on the 28^th of September, 2021. An anniversary of note.