TL;DR
General Tommy Franks’s memoir, written with Malcolm McConnell, runs from an enlisted soldier in 1965 to the commander of U.S. Central Command who led the 2001 Afghanistan campaign and the 2003 invasion of Iraq from MacDill. It debuted at number one on the New York Times list.
Tommy Franks joined the Army in 1965 as an enlisted man. Thirty-five years later he took command of U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, and within fourteen months he was planning a war in Afghanistan.
American Soldier is his account of that career. ReganBooks published it in August 2004, a year after he retired, and it debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
What is American Soldier about?
It starts with a boy growing up in Oklahoma and West Texas and follows him into the Army, through Vietnam as a junior artillery officer and into the 1991 Gulf War as a one-star general. It covers his commands in Korea and at Third Army in Atlanta, the years when he learned to run large formations and the staffs behind them. Those chapters are shorter than the Central Command section, but they set up everything that follows in it.
Most of the book is about his three years at Central Command. Franks walks through the planning and conduct of the Afghanistan campaign after September 11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He describes his working relationship with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and gives his own view of the decisions made in those years, including his frustrations with the Pentagon and the press. He tells it in snapshots more than in a straight line, a style that suits a man who spent his life briefing people.
Who is Tommy Franks?
Franks earned his commission in 1967 after enlisting, finished college through an Army program and rose to command the 2nd Infantry Division and Third Army. He succeeded General Anthony Zinni at Central Command in July 2000 and retired in July 2003. Third Army is Central Command’s Army component, so he came to MacDill already knowing the region and the staff. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.
He came up through the artillery, commanding the 1st Cavalry Division’s artillery in 1987 before he made general in 1991. A museum dedicated to his career is in Hobart, Oklahoma.
He enlisted after leaving the University of Texas, and the book makes that start part of his authority. He’d been on the bottom rung of the organization he later ran, and he never lets the reader forget it.
What does American Soldier show about command memoirs?
It’s the second Central Command memoir from a MacDill commander, and it sits naturally next to Schwarzkopf’s It Doesn’t Take a Hero.
Readers will argue about the wars it covers for a long time.
The book is still the commander’s own record of how the decisions were made. A command memoir exists to leave that record.
The cover also names Malcolm McConnell, a former Foreign Service officer who wrote or co-wrote two dozen books, many on military subjects. He also worked with L. Paul Bremer on My Year in Iraq and with Navy pilot Shane Osborn on Born to Fly. A general with a story that size and no year to spare at a keyboard usually works with someone like him.
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