Bing West reviews Bill Murphy's In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point's Class of 2002 at Forbes in More Perilous Than Proud.
As with other professions, journalism favors its own. Bill Murphy benefited from working for Bob Woodward, the reporter famous for persuading top Washington officials to divulge their secret yearnings along with nasty gossip about their peers during the Nixon administration.
Promising it will move the reader to tears, Woodward and other luminary journalists conferred celebrity status upon In A Time of War. Indeed, the concluding paragraphs in several chapters do stir grief--along with anger and frustration at the apparent stupidity of the mission in Iraq.
Although the book lacks a preface that explains the author's purpose, its subtitle is The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point's Class of 2002. The book, however, is not about the class of 192 women and 1,054 men. Nor is it about the legacy and values of West Point. Instead, it is a description of a handful of lieutenants, how they fell in love, where they served and how their spouses bore up.
One is left with the image of savage combat against untrustworthy Iraqis in a frustrating war that exacted sacrifices equivalent in scale and loss to the Greatest Generation of World War II. Yet this war is less intense by orders of magnitude than Vietnam, and Vietnam was far less intense than World War II. Although this does not mitigate the sorrow or sacrifice of each family that lost a loved one, it is helpful to the reader when a nonfiction writer lays out his frame of reference...
Bill Murphy responds (also at Forbes) in Bing West Was Wrong About My Book.
Bing West deserves respect for his military service in Vietnam and for the passion of his commitment to Iraq. But he got so many basic facts wrong in his review of my new book that I have to set the record straight. Readers inclined to decide for themselves might start at www.inatimeofwar.com, where the first chapter of In a Time of War: The Proud & Perilous Journey of West Point's Class of 2002 is available for free. You'll also a find a three-minute video that introduces some of the main characters.
I'll address the worst of West's factual errors in turn:
First, when West writes that two of the main characters in In a Time of War "were previously profiled in newspapers and books," he is almost certainly referring to a 2007 article in The Washington Post. Click the link, and you'll see a byline that reads: " By Bill Murphy Jr., Washington Post Foreign Service." (Yes, I'm that Bill Murphy Jr.) I wrote the profile about then-captain Drew Sloan after interviewing him many times over several years starting in the summer of 2005, and after I had shadowed him in Iraq for about four days. I did not, as West implies, simply pick up on somebody else's work.
A second main character, Todd Bryant, who gave the ultimate sacrifice for his country in Iraq, was not profiled in a major newspaper that I am aware of. However, he was one of several soldiers whose letters home were featured in a series of articles in The New York Times. I first learned about this from Todd's widow, Jen, in 2006, well into my reporting for this book. (For a transcript of part of the first long interview I did with Jen, click here, and go to the second page of the article.)...