What's a sailor doing in Iraq?

By Water Beneath the Walls: The Rise of the Navy SEALS by Benjamin H. Milligan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I heard about this book through my local independent bookstore (Prairie Path Books) and attended an author event where I purchased it. I found this book a fascinating and exciting read. The author, whom his mother (she was in attendance) calls "Benjie" was a SEAL. When he got back from a deployment in Iraq, his grandmother asked "what's a sailor doing in Iraq?" This proved to be a good question, and Milligan did not have the answer.

So he embarked on a multi-year research project to find out how the armed service tasked with patrolling the waters had the pre-eminent unit for specialized land warfare. The answer required him going back to WWII, and looking at the history of US Special Forces, from the Navy's frogmen to the Army's Ranger and the Marine Corps Raiders. By looking at what they had done wrong, he was able to see what the Navy had done right.

This produced a very thick book, full of tales of derring-do. It also has a number of accounts of things people did badly or just had bad luck. The book ends with the end of the US involvement in Vietnam, when the SEALs were among the last units to leave, having established themselves as the unit they are today. It's an interesting and well-researched work of narrative history. I highly recommend it.



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