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Fick, Nathaniel. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 384pp. $25
Perhaps not since Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon served together in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers during World War I has so much literary talent been employed to recount the operations of a single unit as we find now in the case of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM I. In Generation Kill (reviewed by me in the Winter 2005 Naval War College Review), Evan Wright wrote about his experiences with 1st Recon as an embedded journalist. His perspective is that of an intelligent outsider who related most to the junior enlisted Marines of a single platoon. The commander of that platoon, Nathaniel Fick, has now written his own story. The military memoir written by a junior officer was a mainstay of war literature in the twentieth century, which saw such distinguished examples as Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, John Masters's Bugles and a Tiger, and Phillip Caputo's A Rumor of War. The authors of such works are in general well educated and intelligent, dedicated...