The Battle for Hunger Hill: The 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment at the Joint Readiness Training Center

For many years, American infantry soldiers have been fighting--and losing to--what Bolger terms ""the best insurgent force on Earth"": the ""arrogant, talented, and seemingly unstoppable"" Cortinian Liberation Front, which seeks to overthrow the government of the island of Cortina, in the Gulf of Mexico. That few Americans have ever heard of Cortina is to be expected. It is a fictional country, invented by the army's Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in order to fulfill the army's most important mission--training for war. The Cortinian guerrillas and their equally phony companion force, the conventional-style Peoples Revolutionary Army, are in fact specially trained U.S. troops whose sole purpose is to conduct mock warfare against American soldiers. In well-wrought prose that evidences a penetrating and authoritative military intelligence. Bolger (Savage Peace) an active duty army officer, demonstrates the need for such combat training. Noting that war ""cannot be harnessed, or bent, or shaped to our whims,"" and that it ""proceeds with all the subtlety and formality of a knife fight,"" he unflinchingly exposes the army's weakness in fighting guerrilla wars. Time after time at Fort Polk, the training-class soldiers commit the same predictable and deadly mistakes, and are felled by the wily rebels. Using Bolger's own experience at Fort Polk to provide an inside look at the training program, this is an engrossing, expertly informative look at the tactical problems facing today's infantry, and at the very thorough approach to solving them. (Apr.)