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Rating: 
Summary: Its about time
Review: Finally someone has the guts to admit what actually occured in the Pacific war in WW@. Both my uncles were Marines involved in the battles of Peleliu, Okinawa and Tarawa, and their experiences are mirrored exactly in this book. It was almost a ritual for the Marines, once after killing Japanese soldiers, to harvest various body parts, including teeth, ears, and even cutting off the heads and boiling the flesh off dead Japanese soldiers and sending them back to families in the states to use as cigarette trays! My uncles were taught from the first day of boot camp that the Japanese weren't even human and deserved such treatment. I congratulate the author for being brave enought to withstand the obvious charges of "revisionism" and "political correctness" that his book would elicit.
Rating: 
Summary: Horrible Book... Burn Baby Burn!!!
Review: GOD made the earth, GOD made the sky, GOD made this ignornat fool... only GOD knows why!
Rating:
Summary: Disgruntlement as Analysis
Review: I couldn't help but wonder whether Cameron, who the book jacket noted was a former Marine, had some axe to grind with the Corps. His radically revisionist examination of the combat record of the 1st Marine Division, a unit which lost no battles in either World War II or Korea, can only be termed baffling. More puzzling is his treatment of Marine training, which sustained almost half a million men through a series of savagely violent battles from Wake Island to Okinawa to Chosin Reservoir. Veterans like William Manchester and Eugene B. Sledge provide balanced, accurate analyses of USMC wartime training and its effect on the Marines in combat. I don't know what upset Craig Cameron when he served, but "American Samurai" seems to be a clear attempt to get back at the Corps.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible Book... Burn Baby Burn!!!
Review: Organizations must have identities, however manufactured or inbred, and the Marine Corps is not immune to such an eminently human and natural tendency. I've been a Marine for much of my life, and Cameron is right. Further, anyone with the intellectual courage to contact and speak with him will discover that, alas, he enjoyed his service, he loves the Corps, and is still involved with it as a cultural institution. Anyone who has a problem with Cameron also has a problem with the revered Marine General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner. At the end of his career, he wrote a book entitled "War is a Racket", also available here on Amazon. He makes some equally disturbing revelations about the Marine Corps he served, claiming that he had spent his career as an instrument of American imperialism. Chew on that one, devil dogs.This book, while occasionally going a bit far out in its analysis, does with frightening accuracy portray both the historical and real Marine Corps. It serves as a much needed counterbalance to Thomas Ricks' "Making the Corps". To my mind, the Marines need more thinking men like him to expose some of the sinister dysfunctions of our virtual religion. Call him the Martin Luther of the Corps.
Rating:
Summary: The Truth Hurts
Review: Organizations must have identities, however manufactured or inbred, and the Marine Corps is not immune to such an eminently human and natural tendency. I've been a Marine for much of my life, and Cameron is right. Further, anyone with the intellectual courage to contact and speak with him will discover that, alas, he enjoyed his service, he loves the Corps, and is still involved with it as a cultural institution. Anyone who has a problem with Cameron also has a problem with the revered Marine General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner. At the end of his career, he wrote a book entitled "War is a Racket", also available here on Amazon. He makes some equally disturbing revelations about the Marine Corps he served, claiming that he had spent his career as an instrument of American imperialism. Chew on that one, devil dogs. This book, while occasionally going a bit far out in its analysis, does with frightening accuracy portray both the historical and real Marine Corps. It serves as a much needed counterbalance to Thomas Ricks' "Making the Corps". To my mind, the Marines need more thinking men like him to expose some of the sinister dysfunctions of our virtual religion. Call him the Martin Luther of the Corps.
Rating:
Summary: Missed Calling
Review: Revisionist history notwithstanding, Cameron has, from the safety and comfort of high office, done a predictable and credible job of coloring himself the same shade of yellow as his contemporaries, most routinely referred to these days as "Journalists." To quote a better man, Cameron has shown himself to be, "One of the great fiction writers of our time."ΓΏ
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