The truism that good history takes time to write is proven with this book. COL Fotenot took 26 years to get this 2017 volume to press, and the result is well worth the wait. Most Operation Desert Storm histories, outside of personal memoirs, seem to have been written between 1991 and 1995. Most were mediocre, simply because they did not benefit from the availability of resources that sometimes take years to appear for a variety of reasons. Making use of his time and now available research resources, COL Fontenot has put together a creditable history of the First Infantry Division during the conflict that encompasses campaign history, unit history, and personal memoir in one readable account. One reason for the great pains to which the author takes to write an accurate account is that he was a participant in many of the events described in the book as the commander of the 2-34 Armor task force during Desert Storm.

The format of the book is a bit more complex than the usual military history. Fontenot gives the reader a list of figures and maps, a forward by former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan, acknowledgements, notes to the reader provided by the director of the First Division Museum in Cantigny, Illinois, author's notes about the writing conventions he used in the text, a list of abbreviations (always a big help when reading about modern American military affairs), a preface, introduction, 15 numbered chapters, a very extensive bibliography, and an index.

One of the reasons good histories take time to write is that those books written later usually have greater access to research material. Fotenot makes good use of what he found, especially in terms of Iraqi sources that were only made available in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Ironically, while Fontenot had access to wide swathes of Iraqi military information across most levels of the Iraqi chain of command, he did not have similar success with the U.S. Army classified documents of the same era. I had seen some of COL Fontenot's Freedom of Information Act requests over my years at the National Archives, and, unfortunately, they all had to pass through the hands of the Army Declassification Activity. ADA was, and probably still is, motivated by the fact that the Presidential executive order covering records declassification, EO 13526, didn't require them to declassify any document until it was 30 years old, regardless of whether the national security information therein was still sensitive, which in the case of Desert Storm records simply wasn't necessary. Fontenot's disappointment is evident in his acknowledgements as he tried to resolve critical points in the First Infantry Division's 100-hour war, especially the multiple "friendly" fire events that marred the division's performance.

Despite these setbacks, Fontenot gives us a history of the conflict centered on the First Infantry Division, but provides the reader details at much higher and lower levels in the chain of command. By his waiting for more historical sources to appear, Fontenot gives his writing much needed context, from the reconstruction of the U.S. Army after Vietnam to the post-Cold War drawdown. He also give the reader and inside look of the U.S. Army changing culturally in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. The nature of the All-Volunteer Force, changing political environments, the rise of professionalism, changing attitudes towards race, and the assignment of women to roles that exposed them regularly to combat are all examined in this book, again within the context of the First Infantry Division.

Overall this was a great read, a tribute to the author's dedication to research, the First Infantry Division, and the U.S. Army. ( )