Reddit reviews Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat

You consistently capture the essence of something within our shared experience and express it beautifully. According to RES, I upvote you more often than anyone else.

Please tell me you are compiling these stories into a book. During OCS, I remember being assigned Platoon Leader, by James McDonough. It was a good book that distilled many good lessons for small-unit command and gave a good feel for what military experience entails. It worked reasonably well. Your stuff is better. Aspiring junior officers should be reading your material and incorporating it into their own sense of leadership.

If you aren't already thinking about this please do so. If you do - I'm happy to volunteer to help you with editing/typesetting, etc because I think the things you have to say are worth being heard by a wider audience.

EDIT: I think the General is mean-mugging your cowlick. I can just hear the inner monologue: "God dammit! It starts small with a wild hair or two, but next thing you know there'll be hippies with long hair all over the place!"

Platoon Leader by James McDonough

Platoon Leader by James McDonough is about the author as he's placed in charge of a platoon in Vietnam when, if I remember correctly, they were trying the Strategic Hamlet Program. It was one of my favorite books when I was younger, and one of the few I've read multiple times. Come to think of it, it's about time for me to dig up my old copy and read it yet again...

If you're looking for something more contemporary, you might check out This Man's Army by Andrew Exum. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but I liked his blog back when he was writing one.

The Things They Carried is the standard high school lit teacher response for the cultural touchstones of the war.




For a nonfiction breakdown of the actual military experience and what the warfighting looked like on the ground, I recommend Platoon Leader