My Nuclear Family

May 31, 2010
Now a graduate student, the author of this brash memoir of dysfunction in the armed forces began as a lieutenant on the nuclear submarine USS Hartford, where military professionalism was tarnished by systematic cheating on the nuclear-propulsion exam and high blundering when senior officers ran the ship aground. Then came a stint in the pre-surge Green Zone trying to reconstruct Iraq's electricity system in a unit whose officers spent their time downloading pirated movies or angling for consulting gigs. Tasked with the daily briefing on the collapsing grid— blackouts proliferated as insurgents wrecked power lines, killed repair workers, and kidnapped officials—Brownfield seethed as his efforts to address problems bogged down in military bureaucracy. Brownfield was one obstreperous lieutenant: he crashes a party with Ahmed Chalabi and the American ambassador, sounds off to a visiting senator, and tweaks generals to their faces. He similarly overreaches with his incoherent analysis of the Iraq War as a war for oil and a vague call for a global energy regime of "sustainable interdependence." Still, Brownfield's stimulating, disabused tale of corruption, incompetence, and careerism in uniform is a useful—sometimes explosive—corrective to hagiographic accounts of America's militarized approach to nation building. Photos.

Starred review from June 15, 2010

A former Naval officer examines his time as a member of an energy task force in Baghdad.

Brownfield, a U.S. Naval Academy grad, began his service as a submarine officer. Highly idealistic, he resisted the compromises most new officers made—specifically, cheating on the exams required to certify his competence to run a nuclear reactor. Watching his captain run the sub aground, he learned to distrust the default assumption that maintaining authority is more important than being right. He was ready to leave the Navy for grad school at Yale when, in the aftermath of 9/11, he signed up for service in Iraq. His mission was to help coordinate military and civilian responses to the country's energy shortages. He quickly found that most of his superiors were merely marking time, doing their best not to shake up the status quo. Brownfield's major assignment was reading the text of PowerPoint presentations to commanding Gen. George Casey. None of his immediate team showed the least interest in doing anything to improve the ability of average Iraqis to get electricity. Their major contact in the local government received constant death threats, and the author's superior, a fellow submariner, made empty promises but did nothing practical to help the man. Others were openly cynical in their reasons for being there or just collecting the higher pay for serving in a combat zone. Brownfield, still idealistic, tried to find ways to make a difference. He developed a method to transport heavy diesel engines to their intended destination, only to be blocked by a local official who saw no political advantage in letting them through. A plan to issue millions of compact fluorescent bulbs to Iraqis to save on energy costs was stalled until Gen. David Petraeus came on board—but even with his approval, it remains incomplete. Brownfield left Iraq convinced that energy independence, the professed goal, was in fact a false ideal; instead, he sees "sustainable interdependence" as the only mature approach to solving the world's energy problems.

Witty, insightful, scathing, appalling and inspiring—a must-read book on the Iraq war.

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September 1, 2010
A military contribution to the genre of Gen X memoirs, Brownfields recollections encompass his duty on a nuclear attack submarine and a posting to Baghdad. Now out of the navy, Brownfield reconstructs his service with palpable compositional creativity: the dialogue is invariably witty, sketches of superiors are amusingly irreverent, and accounts of his assignments convey his dubiousness about their usefulness. If inventive at the edges, Brownfield recounts real events and people: he witnessed his sub, the USS Hartford, sustain serious damage in a 2003 grounding, and in Baghdad, he had a Green Zone view of the deteriorating American position in Iraq immediately preceding the militarys surge of 2007. His task: restore Iraqs electricity. His results: nothing! Frustration with failure stokes Brownfields caustic commentary about brother officers devotion to bureaucracy at the expense of achieving the mission. After squeezing the humor out of his experiences, Brownfield unsurprisingly criticizes the Iraq venture and announces that his next career will be in sustainable energy. Lets hope he takes notes since he is such a clever craftsman of the memoir form.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)