The Heart and the Fist / Eric Greitens / 297

From a young college student doing humanitarian work in Bosnia, Bolivia, and Rwanda to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University to one of the toughest military trainings within the US armed forces, Eric Greitens describes his life journey from humanitarian to warrior to founder of the St. Louis non-profit, The Mission Continues.  After researching and experiencing some of the most poverty-stricken and harsh war zones, he came to this realization: “I had become an advocate for using power, where necessary, to protect the weak, to end ethnic cleansing, to end genocide.  But as I wrote papers to make this argument and spoke at conferences, my words seemed hollow.  I was really saying (in so many words) that someone else should go somewhere to do dangerous work that I thought was important.  How could I ask others to put themselves in harm’s way if I hadn’t done so myself?”  This led him to join the Navy SEALs because of its physical challenges as well as its mental and emotional demands.  His narratives really grab the reader into his experiences, and I found myself laughing, cringing, on edge, and even choking up with emotion as some parts.  While the title speaks for itself, the purpose of Greitens’s book is to show the importance of leadership, service, and overcoming challenges in one’s life and throughout the entire book he shows the need for both a compassionate and warrior-like spirit.  This book should be required reading for all military officers if not for all those going into the military.  However, soldier or civilian, this book is applicable to all as Greitens finishes his book by saying, “I’ve learned that courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin, and that every warrior, every humanitarian, every citizen is built to live with both.  In fact, to win a war, to create peace, to save a life, or just to live a good life requires of us – of every one of us – that we be both good and strong.”