‘American Spartan ’ by Ann Scott Tyson, About Maj. Jim Gant’s Mission in Afghanistan by Bing West, Washington Post
… Welcome to “American Spartan,” the “Catch-22” of the Afghanistan war, a mixture of romanticism, fantasy and hard-core dedication. Gant is a real-life character. The author, Ann Scott Tyson, a former Washington Post reporter, is his wife. She has woven together four tales: an over-the-top adventure, a delusional military strategy, a love story and a failure of organizational leadership.
First, the sheer adventure. Gant is a mountain man, circa 1840. He is Jeremiah Johnson, living in the wrong century. Despite his heavy drinking, volcanic mood swings and numerous wounds, he survived more than 40 months of combat. In 2003 and again in 2011, he and a dozen Special Forces soldiers lived in a mountain village in eastern Afghanistan, adjacent to the Pakistan border…