Book Pages: WSJ on Imperial Grunts

Let me brief, because to be perfectly honest I'm a little sleepy. Daniel Ford reviews Imperial Grunts and he doesn't really care for it. That's ok because I don't particularly care for Ford's review. The thing is that Ford spends so much time complaining about Kaplan's prose and word usage that I really have no idea what he hates about the book. I know what I hate about his review - it's too long and does not tell me anything and why I should agree with Ford and not Kaplan. Ford did not totally hate the book and he also noted some of its observations:

One of the more surprising of Mr. Kaplan's findings is that evangelical Christianity helped to transform the military in the 1980s, rescuing the Vietnam-era Army from drugs, alcohol and alienation. That reformation, together with the character-building demands of Balkans deployments of the 1990s (more important, in his judgment, than the frontal wars against Saddam Hussein), created our "imperial grunts."

The phrase is slightly misleading--even off-putting. As a synonym for American troops, "grunt" came and mostly went with the Vietnam War, evoking the dispirited soldiery of that era. And "imperial," with its adjectival nod to "imperialism," concedes too much to those who argue that the U.S. and the world would be better served if we withdrew behind our own borders. But Mr. Kaplan intends something positive--a way of suggesting that our far-flung troops are the descendants of the cavalry, dragoons and civilian frontiersmen who fought the Indian wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed,
his opening chapter is titled "Injun Country," a term that was also popular in the early days of the Vietnam War and one that soldiers use with respect.

At the end he even tosses out a compliment (sort of):

If "Imperial Grunts" serves no other purpose, it is a wonderful corrective to the disenchanted troops we sometimes see on the television news or in the new TV series "Over There," or read about in the dispatches of reporters and pundits who are themselves disenchanted by the war on terror.