Sister in the Band of Brothers, by the award winning correspondent Katherine M. Skiba, is not what you may first imagine it to be upon picking it up. It is not a reporting on war, but rather a telling of her time spent in Iraq during part of the Iraq War.
Katherine Skiba, a correspondent for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, is given the chance at becomming an embeded journalist during the Iraq War. To clarify, an embeded jounalist is a stateside jounalist who goes to war and is placed within an active unit. This reporter would see first hand the effects of war and the lives of active duty men and women of the United States.
Katherine Skiba, after a mini boot camp for jounalists to prepare for deployment and many many immunization shots, is embeded within the 101st Airborne (The Band of Brothers) and the 159th Aviation Brigade. Here she comes to Camp Thunder Road in Kuwait, where she will spend most of her reporting and relaying work.
As said before, this is not a report on war, but rather her account on what happened to her. This is what I see as the downfall of this book. The entire book is about her experience and what happened to her and in general everyone else. There were never any testimonies of other soldiers, rather just her telling you of other soldiers. What she did do, and did a fantastic job of, is reporting on the daily occurances and seeminly menial things that troops do while not in combat.
This brings me to my next point. She never saw combat, and save for one event, was perfectly safe. The one time in which she was in danger was an early SCUD lunch only hours after the start of the war. After this, she never saw combat. This is not something to blame her for, she can't report on things she didn't see.
Even though she was around all of the troops, she didn't necissarily like them all. Constantly through the book she lets her personal thoughts on a Battalion Commander be indefinatly negative. It wasn't just one paragraph, or one page, but rather it was a reoccurance that I began to dislike throughout the entire book, sometimes you just have to know when to stop.
Overall, the book was somewhat interesting. A factor that helped out was the inclusion of photographs within the book, bringing to life some of the soldiers portrayed in her book. Personnaly, I wasn't much of a fan. If you enjoy war reports and the tellings of what happened to the soldiers and thier storys, this is not for you. But if you happen to enjoy memoirs and a new perspective on them, this may be for you. I give it a 4 for a lack of soldier testimony and a constant barrage of bashing on a few troops (whether or not they be true or false, you have to know when to stop).
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