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Notes -
I started reading House To House by David Bellavia. It's a personal account by US Army Staff Sergeant David Bellavia of the battle to re-take Fallujah in 2004 during operation Iraqi Freedom. Reminds me a lot of JTarrou's posts on Violent Class. It's very heavy on the details of the combat that his unit engaged in, not much discussion of any sort of grand strategy, politics, etc. That's clearly the actual experience of the guys on the sharp edge. The kind of thing you don't see written about much.
I noted that the book has a listed co-author, John R. Bruning, who, going by his listed bio, is actually a professional author and journalist. Did he do most of the actual work to transform this into a well-written story? I don't know, but Mr. Bellavia appears to be no slouch in the writing department himself - according to the Amazon bio, he has also been published in "The Philadelphia Inquirer, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other publications". So I guess him and JTarrou are part of a relatively small number of people who are actual combat veterans and can also write about it in a highly articulate and insightful way.
I'm only about a third of the way through the book so far. The Amazon summary is all about some truly heroic badass feats that SSG Bellavia pulled off which earned him the Medal of Honor, but I haven't reached that part yet. The first part is more about the daily life of a Staff Sergeant, which is more about looking after the men in your unit, keeping them safe, well-equipped, and well prepared for the fighting to come. Stuff like evaluating who's good at what, putting the right guys in the right positions, making sure they have a good plan for the fight to come and everyone actually knows what it is.
He doesn't seem to have the generalized disdain towards officers. Some are seen as and portrayed as being useless douchenozzles. Others are, or have grown into, being decent quality combat leaders.
I do see portrayed here the notion that many actual soldiers, even highly skilled and experienced soldiers who volunteered to be in the infantry and have been promoted multiple times, are still a little bit reluctant to actually shoot the enemy sometimes. There's a passage near the beginning of the book where SSG Bellavia is on a rooftop during a battle, sees a presumed enemy on a nearby rooftop before they see him, gets him in his sights, but hesitates to fire. He has what sounds like an anxious feeling that the soldier he sees might actually be one of their Iraqi allied forces. He writes of watching the guy spot him, turn to face him, and start raising his own rifle towards him, all while he's dead on in Bellavia's rifle sights. He writes of thinking for a moment that the guy might actually be an ally who is trying to help him by shooting an unseen other enemy that's actually behind him, of wishing he'd just set down the rifle and go back inside. He does in the end manage to shoot the guy before the guy tries to shoot him.
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