I just finished an opus. After writing that sentence, I had to look up what an opus actually is – I definitely used the word incorrectly. An opus is a musical composition or set of compositions usually numbered in the order of issue. It is not a very long novel that defines an author’s life or work, which is what I thought – that would be a magnum opus. Thus I just finished a magnum opus – I briskly whisked right thru 41 hours and 20 minutes of listening to Once an Eagle (lots of taking the dog out and walking to school helped). This novel defined the writing career of Anton Myrer, a marine corps solider who served during World War II, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller. More importantly, it has been required reading at many of the military academies ever since it is was published in 1968. It is even on the Admiral Paul Zukunft’s (the current Coast Guard Commandant) recommended reading list.

Once an Eagle is not a book of nuance or subtlety. It is stark and blunt with its message of what is needed from a successful military officer. The two main characters, with all their foils and flaws, are both rather one-dimensional. The story begins with a young man, Sam Damon, our hero, walking his teenage girlfriend home in the 1910’s deep in rural Nebraska and reveling in stories about civil war service and other horrors in war. Damon decides to make something of his life and join the military. After talking his way into a Westpoint appointment, but being deferred a year, he enlists because he refuses to wait. Over the next 817 pages (I also checked the book out from the library to help write this review), Damon hikes, crawls, and fights through the deserts of the 1916 Mexican Expedition (to hunt down Pancho Villa), the trenches of World War I, the guerilla warfare of China in the 1930’s, the swamps of the Pacific Island campaign during World War II, and the rainforests of Vietnam.

Even as a private, Damon is a leader and a man of the people. He slowly rises to the rank of Lieutenant General – not on the back of strong staff work or hitting the right career buttons along the way, but by being the absolute best combat officer possible. He is a tough but fair leader – he constantly puts himself in harm’s way and leads by example. During forced marches he walks right along with the men and helps them with their loads. When men won’t fight or follow orders he backs them into a corner and faces them down, sometimes with fists, sometimes with persuasion, sometimes with a velvet bribery, and sometimes with peer pressure. As soldiers hide in foxholes, Damon races to the front line and leads every charge. He is a master of his craft – he knows how to fight better than any other man in the novel. He even pops his head up in one foxhole and tells a private how to unfreeze his rifle – by peeing on it. But more important than leading through his personal example, courage, skill, and luck, Damon stands up for his troops at every possible turn, often in ways that hurt his career. He finds time for the “personal touch,” even in the heat of battle. He defends a soldier being court-martialed because he believes it is the right thing to do, even though it “alienate[s] those in power without accomplishing anything commensurate.” He fights the omnipresent Army bureaucratic system for supplies, staff, training, and down time. He learns to “read, think, and disagree with everything” in order to ensure his soldiers are treated well, knowing that if he fights for them, they will fight for him. In short, Damon is the type of officer that soldiers and sailors love and will follow, and that we should all strive to emulate.

Damon’s polar opposite and eventual nemesis is Courtney Massengale. Massengale represents Myrer’s view of everything we are not supposed to do as officers. He is sycophantic and works his way ahead by positioning himself in the best staff tours. He uses his political connections to gain advantage in the officer corps at every twist and turn. He eschews combat and, when he finally does gain a combat command, he sacrifices troops and lives in able to gain personal fame. When he finds out about the atomic bombing of Japan, and how the war will soon end, he curses the “filthy, vicious scientists” because they have taken away his chance for glory. He knows how to play the game and check the boxes, and does so with aplomb – always using and casting aside others in the process of raising himself up. But other characters point out that Massengale isn’t all bad – he refuses to “let sentiment or personal feelings get in his way,” and always keeping his focus on winning his primary objective and advancing to the next goal. And there is a lot to be learned from staff tours – their experiences can teach you to think strategically and help you become a successful senior officer. The problem is that sometimes his objectives are not the right, or the righteous, ones.

Beyond a contrasting of leadership, Myrer also focuses extensively on two other key aspects of military life: life at home and life at war. Life at home for members of the military is hard. Soldiers and sailors are constantly rotating between deployments and training and spouses often have to take a backseat. This is difficult for many couples – for both spouses and members. Members need to head out to the battlefield and the sea, and their spouses try to support them, but what they really want is “their men, safe at home, sweaty, carefree, and singing in the shower.” Military bases try to use morale events – formal dances, get-togethers, social happenings – to provide an atmosphere of support, but it is still a struggle. This is a struggle I have felt in my own life – one where I have not always succeeded. Damon is not a perfect man – he and his wife Tommy bicker, fight, cope, and try to work as a team, but they often fail as well. But they do find the virtue “simply in having been together, in having struggled through the arduous years, neglected, unvalued, sharing the hopes and wonders of parenthood” and military life together. There is an element of sexism in the book and its depiction of women, but I think this is a reflection of the times it was written in and the era it describes. More than anything else, the portions of the book focusing on life at home rang true because they so accurately paint the emotional free-for-all that is a military marriage. I even laughed at the description of soldiers talking shop at a social function in front of their wives, who quickly became exasperated for being left out of the conversation – because it happens so much in real life.

At the same time, Myrer shows the absolute horror of war – its pain, its monotonous boredom, and its cruelty. His descriptions are clear – “war is seat of confusion, ignorance, and cross-purpose.” It can be next to impossible to accomplish your mission and immensely sad and ominous when you are being defeated and seeing your friends die horribly. Myrer shows there is “nothing glorious about killing one’s fellow man, or being killed by him, or passing many, many days in hatred and misery and fear.” But sadly, for the soldiers, the war never seems to end – “each conflict [Damon had] struggled so arduously to end had lead only to another, and another.” Instead, Myrer encourages the idea of bottling up and taking the war back to those that started it – to the “eminent statesmen…the senate floor, the executive offices of Du Pont de Nemours, Boeing and Ford and Firestone [and] the trading posts on Wall Street” (he has a special hatred for business leaders who profit during war throughout the novel) forcing them to experience the smells, the sights, and the sounds of carnage – and thereby persuading them away from ever leading the nation to war to begin with.

Whether describing the fancy dances, the formal uniforms, the voice inflections (which are translated with superb accents in the audiobook), or a million other things, Myrer accurately depicts life during the first half of the 20^th century. I enjoyed the descriptions, and having lived off base for most of my time in the military, it even made me wonder if I was missing something by not living amongst other sailors and attending all the official events. I learned a lot from this book – yes, the book set up straw men and made the choices for the characters to be clear and stark to demonstrate their ethical inclinations. There was an obvious black and white dichotomy of how officers should lead their troops. I think most of us fall somewhere in between Damon and Massengale. Not all of us are as strong as Damon. And we do need to be able to learn to navigate and work within the bureaucracy. However, it is far more important that we learn to serve the soldiers and sailors on our teams, in our units, and onboard our ships. By competently serving them, they will reflect the example and hopefully put their best feet forward and serve as best they can. Thus while we are all somewhere between Damon and Massengale, the hope is that we fall far more onto the Damon exemplar of leadership. Score: 8.0.