The Sun Never Sets: A Lone Journalist and the American MilitaryKaplan, Robert D. Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. New York: Random House, 2005.
Journalist Robert D. Kaplan was born in 1952 in New York City and received his B.S. in English from the University of Connecticut in 1973. Over the course of his career he has lived in southern Europe and the Middle East and while in Israel he served in the IDF. Kaplan worked as a free-lance journalist for many years before he finally began writing for The Atlantic, for which he is now an editor. Nevertheless, Kaplan prefers to spend his time abroad, embedded with US troops in such varied areas as Columbia, the Philippines, Djibouti and Iraq.
Kaplan is considered an important source within the military-industrial complex and has briefed military staffers and DOD officials on his experiences with the troops and his recommendations that spring from these experiences. His breakthrough work and third book; Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1993) is considered by many to have been influential on Clinton’s policy in that area of the world. In addition to this he has published nine other books on his travels and on policy observations that he has made. These include: Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (1990), The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia (1995), An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future (1998), The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (2000) and Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (2001). When he is not overseas with the troops Kaplan lives with his wife Maria in western Massachusetts.
While the vast majority of Imperial Grunts comes from Kaplan’s personal experience in the field and is an outgrowth of articles he has published in The Atlantic there is still a fair body of information which he draws from outside sources. This information comes from books on ancient history, modern history and military history just to name a few. Included among these are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, and the Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual. In many ways, the endnotes in the back are an excellent list of further foundational reading for those interested in America’s politico-military involvement in foreign affairs in the future.
Overall Kaplan is very well organized and easy to read. After all, it is by a journalist from blue collar roots who spends his time with camo collar workers. At the same time, it is well written and engaging for someone who approaches it from the academic perspective. So long as someone has paid attention in school and taken the time to actually get a diploma then they should not have to spend too much time running to Britannica to fill in the gaps. The only obstacle to ease of reading that people may discover would be the fact that the book is three hundred seventy-eight pages long and divided into eight chapters. If you dislike long chapters you may find this to be an annoyance but hopefully it will be offset by the overall readability as Kaplan is a writer who likes to lend a literary flair to his reporting in a way that is wonderfully reminiscent of Kipling.
Kaplan, like everyone else is indeed biased, particularly against elitists and anti-Americans. As the son of a truck driver he identifies strongly with the working class backgrounds of the troops he reports on and looks derisively upon “armchair reporters” who stay back in their hotel room “stocked with Perrier” and get the majority of their news from local (and often unreliable) stringers. As a result, response to Kaplan is varied and within his own field he is both loved and hated. In The Nation, Andrew J. Bacevich calls Kaplan “a romantic, he is also a populist and a reactionary” and “a public intellectual who happens to live out of his rucksack.” While Bacevich no doubt means this to mean something bad I can personally see nothing wrong with any of these descriptions and we could rightly conclude that he is no doubt one of those Perrier swilling elites that Kaplan finds so revolting. On the other hand Adam Garfinkle of the New York Times has referred to him as a “remarkable man” who “has found himself a large and sometimes powerful audience” and has also stated that “he is determined to convey some very practical, big-picture warnings to the more efficacious members of that audience before they get us all into terrible trouble.” Needless to say Garfinkle and I both find Kaplan to be a quite relevant and necessary read for Americans in international politics and related fields.
Any person involved in the field of politics needs to know where they stand on how America’s foreign policy should be conducted whether they like it or not. This book is important to that knowledge in several ways. First of all, it gives information on the action from the front lines so that people making their decision have something upon which to base it. Second, Kaplan puts forth his own opinions on how policy of the future should be shaped. Whether you agree or disagree, at least you have taken the time to comprehend his opinion and are then free to form your own. Finally, in many ways it gives you a personal connection to the American camo collar class that has risked their own American dream for the American dream of others. A better civilian understanding of the military is important for the future and should be pursued by the former through such means as print media, film and personal interactions.
Kaplan is not finished on the subject. What he refers to as the “American Imperium” (sphere of military influence) virtually covers the globe and ranges from a single FAO in Mongolia to Spec Ops teams in Columbia to a Marine Expeditionary Unit in Iraq. Already he is traveling with the troops and working on a book that further details the American men at arms maintaining American security. Based on what he has already given us in Imperial Grunts I cannot wait to see what he will give us next. | 
