The Battlefield Can Be an Unforgiving Teacher - Janet Maslin, New York Times
The Unforgiving Minute is former United States Army Capt. Craig M. Mullaney's brisk, candid memoir about his education as a soldier. He learned different lessons in different places. As a cadet at West Point he learned to be dutiful, punctilious and unerringly accurate, even about the military method of folding underwear. At Ranger School he learned how to navigate difficult physical terrain and endure grueling tests of mettle. At Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar, he had a teacher who advised: "Read and think. Simultaneously if possible." At home he thought he had learned how to make his father proud — until that father walked out and never came back.
As a reader he learned from writers as diverse as T. E. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling (from whose poem "If" this book takes its title), Jane Austen and Thucydides. As a traveler he vacationed with buddies, partied heartily and learned that the world is very large. And as an American he was in New Zealand on Sept. 11, 2001, when someone asked if he had seen the news and said, "I'm so sorry." At that point every lesson absorbed by this soldier in training suddenly took on different meaning...
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