Books Highlight Navy Culture and
Vietnam Medics, Terrorism in Beirut
By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor
NAVY STRATEGIC CULTURE:
Why the Navy Thinks
Differently
By Roger W. Barnett, Annapolis,
Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2009.
223 pp. $28.95
ISBN: 978-1-59114-024-5
Navy veterans are familiar with the
light-hearted aphorism that there
is “the right way, the wrong way and the Navy way” of
doing things. On a more serious take, there is a distinct Navy culture that has evolved over centuries of
operations and warfare at sea that molds independent
leaders and promotes self-reliance and innovative
problem-solving. Roger Barnett, a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College,
shows how that culture, despite the interconnection
of global communications and increasingly joint operations, maintains an independent mindset in an
unforgiving environment. The author shows how
Navy culture is expeditionary to the core and how it
affects the strategic thinking of its leaders. He also
warns against the effects of introducing destabilizing
social engineering by those who do not understand
the culture of the mariner.
PEACEKEEPERS AT WAR:
Beirut 1983 — The Marine
Commander Tells His Story
By Retired Col. Timothy J. Geraghty,
Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2009.
249 pp. $29.95
ISBN: 978-1-59797-425-7
The ill-fated multinational peace-keeping effort in Lebanon in 1982-
1984 ended disastrously when truck bombs driven by
Hezbollah terrorists demolished the barracks of the
24th Marine Amphibious Unit and the headquarters of
a French paratrooper unit, killing 214 Marines and
Sailors and 58 Frenchmen. The destruction of the
Marine barracks is said to have been caused by the
largest non-nuclear explosion ever recorded. The
author, commander of the Marine unit at the time,
gives his account of the incident and his position that
failure to exact retribution at that time emboldened the
terrorists to expand their jihad.
NAVY MEDICINE IN VIETNAM: Oral Histories from Dien
Bien Phu to the Fall of Saigon
By Jan K. Herman, Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland & Co., 2009. 365 pp.
$55.00
ISBN: 978-0-7864-39997-7
Jan Herman, historian for the Navy’s
medical establishment since 1979,
offers this compilation of personal
accounts from Navy doctors, dentists, nurses and hospital corpsmen, and their patients, who served in Southeast
Asia from the end of the French colonial period to the end
of the Vietnam War in 1975. The Navy operated a hospital in Da Nang and two hospital ships offshore to support
the large Marine Corps presence in South Vietnam. The
author and the veterans he interviewed explain how
widely available medical evacuation by helicopter and
medical advances in such areas as vascular surgery, antibiotics and others dramatically increased the percentage of
lives and limbs saved among the wounded. The book also
honors the heroics of the more than 5,000 hospital corpsmen and dental technicians who served in the war and
the 689 who lost their lives on the battlefield.
SHIPS OF THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTIONARY NAVY
By Mark Lardas, Oxford, U.K.:
Osprey Publishing, 2009. $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-84603-445-9
The oceanic separation of Great
Britain and its rebellious American
colonies guaranteed that the American Revolution would include war
at sea. The new Continental Navy initially converted
merchant ships that proved too slow to compete with the
Royal Navy and eventually built frigates that gave good
account of themselves. By the end of the war, the Continental Navy disbanded with four frigates surviving, but
the legacies of John Paul Jones and others laid the foundation of what eventually would become the U.S. Navy.
Mark Lardas, a naval architect by training, details the histories and designs of the ships of the Continental Navy
in this slim but well-illustrated monograph. ■
