My Share of the Task: A Memoir – General Stanley McChrystal (Portfolio)

If you are looking for a book filled with bitterness at the Obama administration in response to General Stanley McChrystal dismissal, then this is not your book. If you’re looking for a book that responds to the Rolling Stone Magazine piece or the follow up book, The Operators, both penned by the smarmy little weasel, Michael Hastings, then this is not your book.

If you are looking for an interesting memoir full of insight not only into the McChrystal’s long, successful military career, but also a story laced with leadership with a local and global worldview, then this is your book. McChyrstal’s career in an interesting mix of classroom, fellowship training and boots on the ground action. This is not the tale of cooridors of  power, perfumed prince, that is more a product of the Pentagon than the battlefield.

 

In My Share of the Task McChystal delivers intimate details of the strategy and the on the ground execution of the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terror leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal cut his teeth in special forces, so he was not risk averse to strapping it on and spending a night in the ruts. You can feel the regret in the passages that describe a just missed attempt to take out Zarqawi.

The book takes it’s title from the Army Ranger’s creed which reads in part; I will always keep myself mentally alert, physically strong and morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task whatever it may be, one-hundred-percent and then some. That creed rings true in the pages of the book which are long on spreading the credit to colleagues and underlings in place of the, I, me, my approach that’s so typical of these kinds of books.

Along the way McChrystal provides a guide post to leadership of a large, complex organization.