My Nuclear Family: A Coming-of-Age in America's Twenty-first-Century Military Review

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(More customer reviews)I might as well say it straight out: I just don't trust this man. His book consists of a series of stories about his experiences in the US Navy, interspersed with expositions on the nature of war in general and the Iraq War in particular. The tone of both the stories and the expositions is one of unremitting arrogance. He's always the smartest guy in the room, and -- with a few notable exceptions -- everyone around him is incompetent, dishonest, or both. This attitude not only makes for some tortuous reading, it also undermines his credibility as an author. And credibility is everything for this book, because Brownfield makes some pretty damning claims about the U.S. Military without providing any evidence to back them up.
Now, perhaps these claims are all true. I have no illusions about the perfection of either our military or our political leadership, particularly during the Bush administration. But I need facts to back up the kinds of claims of incompetence Brownfield makes, not just opinions, and the author provides no evidence whatever that the events actually happened, much less in the contemptible, bumbling manner he describes. There are no footnotes in this book, no documentation of the events, no research -- just a series of stories and opinions. According to his introduction, he is revealing classified information and he's changed the names of all the people he belittles, so there's no way to check his facts, much less validate his opinions. All we have to go on is his word, and that's why personal credibility is so important to this book. Given the smug, self-serving tone of superiority that permeates the book, I find no compelling reason to believe his claims.
As to the lectures on war that break up the stories, they mostly state the obvious or rehash events that are much better covered in other books -- books that carefully document the inner workings of our military and the political manipulations that led to the invasion of Iraq (read Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 if you really want the facts). But if there is anybody left on the planet who still thinks that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, or that he really did have weapons of mass destruction, this author has nothing new to say to them.
I was hoping to learn something of value from this book, something that might help me understand why our country continues to have these terrible and costly military misadventures. All I learned from this book is that the author was always the smartest guy in the room. Or chose to believe that he was.

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