American Soldier

by General Tommy Franks

Hardcover, 2004

Status

Available

Call number

355.0092

Genres

Publication

Regan Books/Harper Collins (2004), Edition: 1ST, Hardcover, 608 pages

Description

Few individuals have the chance to contribute so much of themselves to the American story as General Tommy Franks. In American Soldier, he captures it all. The Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command from July 2000 through July 2003, General Tommy Franks made history leading American and Coalition forces to victory in Afghanistan and Iraq - the decisive battles that launched the war on terrorism. General Franks retraces his journey from a small-town boyhood through a lifetime of military service including his heroic tour as an Artillery officer in Vietnam, where he was wounded three times. Drawing on military records declassified for this book, Franks offers the first true insider's account of the war on terrorism. He puts you in the operations center for the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom just weeks after 9/11, capturing its uncertain early days and the historic victory that followed.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member afderrick

An extremely easy book to read. I actually had to do a report on him when I was in ROTC. The first half of the book is his career and how he got started. It seemed as though he just stumbled up the chain and had a lot of lucky breaks. The second half is his time as commander during the war. Like I

said the book was easy to read, and I would suggest it for anyone in the military. It was written in a military format, in that every chapter or section he summarized everything he was going to talk about, explained it, and then recapped it. Just like we are taught to do.

I would recommend this book for military people, not sure if people outside the military would enjoy this book.

This book does stay in my library at the house

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LibraryThing member CosmicCat

An excellent account of current history.

LibraryThing member Chris_El

Very interesting to read about how the attack in Afganistan and Iraq was planned and executed. Includes behind the scenes discssions with the President and Rumsfeld during and after 9/11. Also interesting to note the differences in how we have changed the way our military command structure works

with CENTCOM commanding all services in a geographical area rather than the different branches of the services controlling their assets as we did in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. It seems like the practice works well here. Interesting to note that after commanding CENTCOM Gen Franks turned down the chief of the Army job becasue he was only interested in a warfighting position.

His experiences in Vietnam as a young artillary officer was a high point of the book as he was in the thick of the fighting on many occaisions. It is somewhat comforting to see commanders sending people to die that have experienced combat themselves and know the price and how to count the cost.

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