Breakfast with the Dirt Cult

by Samuel Finlay

"I'm going to make a pinkie-swear with you right here and now, Tom Walton; when, not if, you return from Afghanistan, you must come up here and I will have a mad passionate affair with you..." With this proposal, Thomas Walton, an infantry soldier in Alpha Company, Second Platoon, arrives at the threshold of events that will change his life forever.

Breakfast with the Dirt Cult chronicles the days of love and war in the life of Tom Walton. Torn between a beautiful, bibliophilic, Canadian ex-stripper and the hunt for Al-Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan, Walton finds himself forced to grapple with being a young man in the days of modernity.

While Breakfast with the Dirt Cult has been written as a novel, it is based on a true story. The names have been changed and the chronology has been condensed for the sake of editing.

Genres: War, Fiction, Military Fiction, Americana, Politics, American, Military History

318 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Samuel Finlay served as an infantryman in Bosnia and Afghanistan. He enjoys reading good books, listening to old music, traveling, and sitting on porches. He was born and raised in Oklahoma.

Reviews

[Miranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy from the author through the First Reads program. I was very excited and eager to read it because I’ve (like many others) always had a fascination with the military. I’m always interested in reading how people deal with being pushed to their limits and who does that more than our military. I feel like people are either going to really like and take something from this book, or they are going to be thoroughly offended and resent it for that.

At first the way it was written was difficult for me to follow so I had to slow down then things were fine. It was a little hard to follow some of the Army lingo and I couldn’t really paint a good mental picture (which I feel is fine because I’ve never been through something so graphic). The biggest thing, for me at least, was how hard it was to follow the other people included in the book. I got confused about which Sergeants Walton got along with and the ones he didn’t care for. Another thing was the vulgar language. Usually it won’t bother me but this had a lot, and it wasn’t Walton’s POV or description because the book wasn’t in his POV. I felt like the author didn’t necessarily need to describe things with such profanity. I kind of expected the profane dialogue, because of the setting/plot/etc. of the book, but this was a bit of a shock. Something totally unrelated to the actual book is that for some reason I found the font very distracting and it messed with my eyes, causing the words and sentences to run together so I feel like that might’ve been a factor in the reason that it took me longer than usual to read this.

Apart from all that I must say, I really grew to like Mr. Thomas Walton. He was very realistic and down to earth. He spoke his mind but still did his job. I was a little disappointed towards the end with his actions, but I could almost feel the heartbreak he was feeling.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Filled with a lot of rage at the world around him and a feeling of being lost, this book reminded me of something like Fight Club a lot. The occasional rant from the author inserted into parts of the story were very jarring and broke up the flow in a bad way, even if i agree with his views they could have been told in a better way than “Walton thought that etc...”

The last half of the book raised my rating from 2 to 3 stars just because I identified with what Walton felt after everything and the author’s writing improved from the first half which was mediocre. Overall i enjoyed reading it but im not sure i would recommend it.

[Oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Army Amy Army Amy Amy Army Amy Army

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1952, Ralph Ellison published, to great acclaim, his first and only novel, Invisible Man. The book narrated how Ellison’s protagonist, a black man, suffered social oppression. But that was long ago, and one thing black people definitely don’t suffer anymore is oppression. Rather, many dish it out, aided by their allies of other races, as seen most dramatically in the terroristic Floyd Riots, but it happens every day in every organization in America. The targets are, most of all, those at the bottom of today’s social hierarchy—heterosexual (that is, normal) white men outside the professional-managerial elite. And Samuel Finlay’s Breakfast with the Dirt Cult is, one might say, the new Invisible Man.

Think hard. Can you recall any book, movie, television show, or any other cultural product that celebrates, honors in any way, or even talks about in other than a contemptuous manner, normal, working- and middle-class, white men (whom we can name the backbone of America, or BOA)? No, you can’t, because our ruling class despises the BOA and works hard to teach everyone, most of all our young, that the BOA are to be despised. Browse any bookstore, and you will quickly realize that none of the books are directed at boys or young men, except with the aim of feminizing them, grooming them, or otherwise corrupting them. There is plenty of young adult fiction—which, as it has for a long time now, all centers around wildly unbelievable kick-ass girlbosses (since the Floyd Riots depicted several shades darker). What is never shown is heroic men, or even non-heroic men who reflect any real-life men from the BOA. This is not because consumers demand such products; rather, it is a deliberate choice by publishers to use their power to indoctrinate the young (similar to the choices made by video game makers). Publishers choose indoctrination, even though they thereby harm their economic interests, because they hold their economic interests inferior to their ideological (and social) interests.

But Finlay, who unsurprisingly was forced to self-publish his book (in 2012), offers us a corrective, a book that puts the BOA, and the uphill struggles faced by the BOA, front and center. Breakfast with the Dirt Cult revolves around the American-Afghan war which started early in the twenty-first century and ended last year with our total and ignominious defeat. It is a roman à clef, a tale about real people that purports to be a novel. The protagonist, Tom Walton, is a stand-in for Finlay himself, and it seems fairly clear that what he writes happened more or less as he writes it. His book offers the type of story that used to be taught to all young men, to aid them on their own journey as they came of age. It revolves around how a man finds himself, in the three matters that loom larger, by nature, in any normal young man’s life than all others. How shall he conduct himself with women? How shall he earn the respect of, and measure himself against, his peers? And, related to the second, how will he respond when he is thrust into danger, most of all into violent confrontations with other men?

Walton is an infantryman in the United States Army, apparently with the 10th Mountain Division. He begins the book by falling in love with a Canadian woman while on leave, in 2002. The frame of the book is really this romance, more than the war—its beginning, its flickering flame throughout intermittent fighting in Afghanistan, its flare-up on Walton’s return to the States, and its ultimate unsurprising end—unsurprising, at least, to a third-party observer who has left his youth behind. For Walton, it’s a formative experience, because for a young man, establishing his connection with the fairer sex is a mysterious, but crucial, process. Walton, however, suffers because this process, like all relations between the sexes, has been corrupted beyond all recognition, and the BOA is the most affected by this, not having the buffers our society ladles out to the professional-managerial elite and non-whites (instead being force-fed killing drugs with the promise of escaping reality, temporarily or permanently).

Still, despite the romantic frame, most of the book’s detail is military memoir, alternating with insights about history and the position in which America finds itself, a corrupt and clueless elite ruling over a dissatisfied yet demoralized mass. While he puts on no airs, Walton reads more than the average infantryman, and is reflective enough to cite Toynbee on the suicide of civilizations and Ibn Khaldun on asabiyyah, along with Juvenal on how wealth corrupts great societies. He sees that the Enlightenment was a fraud that has led society into a box canyon, and he can hear the water rushing up the canyon. These introspective asides give the book a dimension lacking in other military memoirs (such as Clinton Romesha’s slanted Red Platoon).

Walton is an enlisted man, although as a college graduate he starts above the very bottom, and eventually he becomes a minor NCO. He gives us a worm’s-eye view of infantry training, as it was conducted in 2002. Many of his fellow soldiers are crisply drawn; others cycle into and out of the story (which, along with heavy use of military acronyms, to someone like me largely unfamiliar with military procedure, makes the story occasionally hard to follow). This is not basic training, the topic of innumerable films; it is ongoing training as part of base life, with deployments to Bosnia (before the action in the book takes place) and then to Afghanistan. As a result, the life of the soldiers is sketched in a more complex way than is usually found (and the language and some of the happenings are definitely not-safe-for-work).

The training process Walton shows is one of learning military technique while also figuring out where one fits within a group of men who depend very heavily on each other—not only in battle, but for camaraderie (with a great deal of drinking; I didn’t know soldiers were allowed to drink so much on base, at least in non-Muslim countries). This training is of particular interest to me, because I think acquiring military skills on the fly is the coming thing among parts of the general American population. I have been gently criticized for recently saying, in a podcast appearance with Buck Johnson, that basic military training for former civilians could, in a fracture situation in the United States, be accomplished “in a couple of weekends.” While it is true that basic training in armed defense could be completed relatively quickly, it is also true that I exaggerated. Nonetheless, I think that with decent trainers, adequate equipment, and sharp incentives, it would not take more than several weeks to weld an ad hoc militia into a quite capable defensive force, and somewhat more time to turn it into an adequate offensive force against other ad hoc militias and general bad actors, which are the likely initial opponents. (This assumes, however, that the men are in reasonable shape already, not fat and lacking all stamina, which is not a safe assumption. Finlay shows how the military requires, or required, constant exercise, and a great many men today are wildly out of shape, so perhaps that would make training take somewhat longer.)

The soldiers exhibit no apparent racial tension; twenty years ago was the apogee of American race relations. There’s plenty of perfectly normal racial banter, such as eternal arguments between a Puerto Rican in the squad and a California migrant. “Sexy Ricans are head and shoulders above you peasant Spics!” Walton acknowledges that even then, much of the soldiers’ banter would be deemed “hate speech” by the totalitarians back home; I shudder to think what the commissars in today’s military do with such jokes. I assume that the repression of normal speech has reached to the very bottom ranks into the military, but I could be wrong in this. Loose talk among soldiers has been going on forever, and great commanders sometimes take advantage of this to humanize themselves. But I doubt if today’s leaders, much less the diversity hatchet women, have the sense of humor that Julius Caesar did.

Racial interplay, however, is only a subset of an important larger question. How much has our core military, the quite-small actually fighting military, which is composed almost entirely of members of the BOA (along with some non-whites of mostly not-dissimilar views), changed since 2002? Not only in composition, but also in coherence? I would think quite a bit, as everything in our society has been politicized and ideologized by the Left. Now, for example, we have the insanity of women in combat units (though women anywhere near the military is insane), and all soldiers are required to celebrate the corrosive homosexuals and trannies who are aggressively recruited to join their ranks. I find it difficult to believe that what is shown by Finlay—the constant physical training demands, the completely-normal racial jokes, the casual contempt for homosexuals, and the even-more-normal sexual ferment of heterosexual men, aimed at any woman crossing their sight—is permitted in today’s military. It is no surprise that today’s military is having extreme trouble meeting its recruiting goals; this failure seems like obvious cause and effect. Other than benefits, it’s hard to see why anyone from the BOA would want to join today’s military, given the cost/benefit analysis.

Leaving these political questions aside, Breakfast with the Dirt Cult shows why men fight. They fight to earn respect from other men, to prove themselves, and to earn the attention, admiration, even love, of women. At the extreme, they fight for inward-focused personal glory, as did Achilles, but even that is done to demonstrate something to others. All fighting by men is merely some form of the obsession that drove the son of Peleus. They may fight also, but secondarily, for practical reasons, to defend their own, narrowly defined as their family or broadly defined as their nation. Walton is eager to fight “the terrorists who attacked his country,” but that is not what keeps him going, most of the time; it is too abstract. And he recognizes that fighting for the nation isn’t permitted unless tightly circumscribed. He knows, he can viscerally feel, that something in this is very wrong with our elites and where they have led the country. “Pride in one’s country, pride in one’s people, history, ways and beliefs,” could be exploited whenever the American elite “needed the yokels and suckers to sign up, line up, and go fight wars.” But pride is not allowed if “those same yokels and suckers try to express those feelings in ways that didn’t involve killing strangers, but rather sought to preserve and cultivate the strength, identity, and spirit of their homes.” Then it is forbidden, and execrated as evil—what would today be characterized with the stupid boogeyman term “white supremacy.”

Whatever the reasons, it is in the nature of men, and a key driver of civilization, that men want to fight, a truth that is foolishly denied today, labeled “toxic masculinity.” (Sebastian Junger, in his books Tribe and Freedom, has interesting thoughts on this topic.) A man who refuses to fight is not a man, and fighting completes a man. As Walton says, “Being on the hunt with his tribe . . . there was a rightness to it all that appealed to some fundamental aspect of his masculinity in a way which he found both thrilling and liberating.” This centrality of fighting to masculinity is what makes war a coin with two sides. It has always been recognized, even if of late it has become fashionable to deny, that war has a heroic, even glorious, side. “War also offered a glimpse of something transcendent. . . . For all its ugliness . . . for a brief instant, [Walton] had seen men touch upon glory.” This can be seen in much great literature—Shakespeare’s Henry V comes to mind, and this glory that is possible in war (though certainly not war on behalf of or at the behest of our current globohomo rulers, which is a foolish waste, and perhaps only rarely in modern war in general) could be a key antidote to the wussification that has been forced upon American men. Yes, the other side of the coin is horror, and, it is strange to say, Americans have equally forgotten that side of the coin. Even for those few who have not forgotten, they tend not to actually understand, because most modern Americans don’t understand anything at all about war. Nearly the only ones who do are men like Walton, and their immediate families. But Americans will, I predict, learn all these lessons again.

All this said, fighting cannot be permitted to become an end in itself; that tears a society apart. The role of a civilization (and especially of the women in that civilization) is to channel this impulse to productive and useful ends. This brings up the question, debated not long ago in the comments section here, of whether any American soldier should have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Or Bosnia, for that matter, or any other place American soldiers have died in the past thirty years.) A mother Walton meets, when he is recuperating back in the States from extensive bullet damage to his hand and arm, says of her son, “He died protecting his country. I have to believe that.”

But he didn’t. And that his mother mourns for no good reason at all is one of the great tragedies of end-stage America. I have great respect for those, including friends of mine and readers of The Worthy House, who chose to serve in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet their service was a pointless waste, beyond what the men themselves may have gained. Regardless of whether the people we killed were so-called bad people (and most were not, such as the ten children Finlay sees, chopped to bits by a female A-10 pilot, an incompetent like many or most female pilots), as a nation we accomplished far less than nothing. We made the countries in whose affairs we interfered worse for their surviving populations, while we did not make our own country one iota “safer” (already a dubious primary goal, smacking of feminization). Instead, we enormously enriched those who profit from the massive expansion of our odious national-security state, while we became accustomed to enthusiastically granting our rotten elites unparalleled powers to oppress Americans, which they have used with gusto, and are vigorously trying to expand yet further, with the specific current goal of oppressing the BOA. We, following George W. Bush (God rot him), in Walton’s words spent trillions to “overthrow [Afghanistan and Iraq’s] political, cultural, and economic structures,” not to mention those of several other countries (notably Ukraine) using less violent means, all with the intention of turning them into “democracies,” meaning not ruled by the people, but rather full participants in the noxious Left project of combined emancipation and forced egalitarianism. The only silver lining is that all this stupidity has brought our regime closer to its inevitable end while accomplishing few of its goals, but it has been very costly for the BOA, and will be yet more costly before the end.

Anyway, back to the book. Walton spends quite a bit of time musing on the culture and habits of “Haji,” both the enemy Taliban and the population in general. He admires their ability to maintain their identity over the centuries and millennia; they are not deracinated like the people of the West. Certainly, Walton can see that in many ways Haji culture is grossly inferior. “[Haji] was brutal, illiterate, broke as a joke, and smelled like five tons of petrified ass. Allah only knew what he did with those goats. However, he bowed to no one, and Walton grudgingly respected him for it.” (A few years back, one of my eight-year-old boys got in trouble at his school for referring to generic enemies in schoolboy warplay as “Hajis.” His teacher said that was “raaaaaaaacist.” We praised him, and removed him from that school.) But Walton can appreciate Haji for what they are, good and bad. What he, correctly, does not see them as is proto-Westerners, eager to adopt Western customs and beliefs. He sneers at the many stupidities American elites tried to impose on the Afghans. When some meddling staffers from a ridiculous NGO get shot in a village, Walton reflects “Going into a village in a foreign country, and teaching their children different ways and ideas, was asking for trouble. Using a classroom to separate children from the culture of their parents was a form of kidnapping.” True enough, though such kidnapping is something our enemies have done for a long time in America as well, and have now ramped this program up to ludicrous speed, not receiving the same payback, not yet, at least.

All things military, even the stupidities that get men killed, Walton takes in stride. He reserves his bitterness most of all not for the brass, or the rotten elites of America, but for the many infelicities between men and women in the modern age. Feminism is a constant target of his, as it should be, for so-called feminism is an abomination that is largely responsible for the ruin of the West. Walton’s fundamental complaint is that right order between the sexes has broken down, in a manner that benefits nobody, but harms men most of all. Feminists “had struggled for, and won, a world where men were seen as the problem and women as the solution.” Men have become “the disposable sex.” Men are expected to bear all burdens but to make no claims. Men, most of all men in the BOA, are taught that to atone for being men, they must defer to everyone, especially any woman, but also any so-called elite. “If he gave, then he would receive. If he was ‘nice,’ then he would be loved and respected. This was a lie.”

Walton complains, with total accuracy, that the culture demands a man make his woman’s happiness his top priority . . . [review completes as first comment]

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Breakfast with the Dirt Cult" by Samuel Finlay chronicles the deployment of American soldier Tom Walton, an Oklahoma native who has not forgotten his roots despite his exploits to Bosnia, Canada, and finally Afghanistan, where most of the book takes place. The novel is a beautiful juggling act between Walton's thoughts on war and country, his love for ex-stripper Amy, and his ever-souring view on mortality.

Finlay writes in a way that puts the reader on the front lines of both the war and Walton's emotional turmoil as he must face losing fellow soldiers, shouldering the confusion and grief of unrequited love, and find his place in the army and in life. The combination of raw imagery, vulgarity, potent sexual desire, and an aching love for humanity and doing right by others makes for an incredibly compelling story, one that I am so grateful to have been able to read.

I found myself right there with Walton throughout the entire book, even when I was shocked by some of his actions or thoughts, or even angered by some of his viewpoints. This book is political as it is tragic. Walton's musings drawn from the events of his life are movingly articulated and bring to the forefront some real issues and important themes that we oft overlook when glorifying the military. Finlay's book sheds light on all that our soldiers must endure, while taking the glamor from the role and injecting the reader's understanding with visceral emotion and truth. This book provides incredible perspective on the human side of war and serving the country, boiling all we do down to being human and trying to find ourselves.

Excellent read, though not for the faint of heart.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Finlay has a way of articulating Walton's thoughts that really sum things up. Here is an excerpt regarding how the elite in this country view good people:

Their yeoman ancestors, with their toughness, high degree of religiosity, and community-centered norms and values, had been handy to have around for whenever the country had needed people to till the dirt, settle the frontier, bale hay, pick cotton, mine coal, turn bolts, work railroads, and fight wars. However, their decendents in the brave new world were to be fitted with a yoke of shame, and to be unofficially branded as trash or vilified in their own home. They were to be fed a steady diet of dissention, entertainment, and dependency infrastructure lest they maintain some semblance of backbone and self-reliance.

Here's an article that posted at takimag if you want to know what a struggle it was for the author to publish this great book.
Sargeant Samuel Finlay: Shot and Not Heard

[Patrick C Donahue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! Read it!

A soldier’s story of service in Afghanistan - and it’s impact on his life. The first « Thin Red Line » or « The Naked and the Dead «  of this era’s wars. More to come, sadly.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightfully unpolished. Enjoyed the romance plot even more than scenes from downrage. Contribution to the growing anthology of the U.S. military's experience of war in Afghanistan.

[Stephanie Fachiol]

’Tain`t—so—bad—by—day because o' company,
But night—brings—long—strings—o' forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up an' down again
There's no discharge in the war!

I—'ave—marched—six—weeks in 'Ell an' certify
It—is—not—fire—devils, dark, or anything,
But boots—boots—boots—boots—movin'up an' down again,
An' there's no discharge in the war!

— Rudyard Kipling, “Boots”


Rarely do I read modern military fiction, and even more rarely do I read indie/self-published works. In this case, I took a leap because a literary magazine I occasionally skim had discussed this in the context of the Afghanistan withdrawal, which is up there with the pre-election Covid vaccine controversy (almost entirely backwards from what it is now) and a very suspicious Romanian election on the list of “things I remember but nobody around me seems to.”

My overall experience with this book makes it difficult to review. On the one hand, Walton is a man who cares deeply for his Joes, who shrinks away from the thought of an officer’s career because military decisions are life and death, and yet he feels the Brass has all failed upwards; he is a man who believes in romance and yet laments he cannot find it in strip clubs; he isn’t Christian, but he was raised Christian, and he feels his countrymen in flyover America are unfairly blamed for every major problem while also being the ones to be severely affected by war or poverty. He is disillusioned: he loves his country but feels the elites have betrayed him—he describes it like having been spat on the face. The first quarter of the book was slow, with strange sentence structures that actively impeded my ability to sink into the story (and, in fact, nearly resulted in a DNF because I did not care for all the strip club scenes), but by the time Walton is describing his time in the ‘Stan, I was immersed.

A brutally honest firsthand account is a double-edged sword; I admired Walton in much of the book and had a vehement dislike to some of his opinions in others. My father, who did not serve in active combat but did have required military service in Romania, once told me that the topics of conversation among recruits were always women (that is, sex), booze, and sports. This is apparently a universal phenomenon. Like my father, I find none of these riveting topics, and so I found the conversations centered around them particularly dry. Walton correctly identifies many problems with the current cultural milieu, including an all-too-brief moment of self-awareness that he is judging casual sex and the death of romance *while he is at a strip club himself*, but that does not mean he is correct all the time. Walton has contradictory and confusing views on women because he spends his free time watching porn and going to strip clubs. That’s all I’m going to say on that.

The book lays all bare, in both the narrator’s vices and the firsthand experiences that have affected him. Walton IS heroic, in the end, even if the foul-mouthed and profanity-laden account nearly brought me to a DNF. It’s a book I don’t regret reading, but find very, very difficult to recommend.

[Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I’m being honest, not the best literature in the world. Still a decent book. Honest account of a soldier’s experience in Afghanistan, and the love story and reflections on women were refreshing and heartbreaking.

[AL White · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorely disappointed in this book. As a vet with multiple deployments, I looked forward to reading it after coming across the Michael Anton review and agreeing with many of the political observations listed there.

Instead of providing insights on the nature of war, this book reads like an incel manifesto. The author fills page after page with contradictory diatribes against women, lambasting them for not being willing to take dirty or dangerous jobs while simultaneously laying out the same tired arguments about why women don’t belong in the military. According to the author, all women who refuse servicing men’s desires are manipulative, power-tripping bitches, but the ones who do acede to these desires are cheating whores. The premise underlying the author’s viewpoint supposes that men’s desires are somehow uncontrollable and it’s women’s responsibility to manage male lust (ironically, this viewpoint shares uncomfortable similarities to the Taliban’s, and their demand that women remain completely covered in public).

If you want to understand why the military has a sexual assault problem, this is a great read.

[shauna · Rating 2 out of 5]

first off, this is my favorite cover of a book i own. that's the entire reason i bought it. i had a really hard time rating this book, since it's difficult to be objective on a really well written novel that genuinely opens your eyes, but is shot through with constant interjections about the stupidity of feminism, how women are all evil, manipulative, and worth nothing but sex and babies. i really hope that the author is just really great at writing misogynists, because there were some amazing sections of this, but i truly think this would have worked as a short story if you cut out the hundred excess pages of anti-woman ranting. i knew from page one that i absolutely wasn't the target audience for this book, and that i wouldn't have a good time reading it, but for some reason it kept me hooked. i absolutely don't agree with nearly any opinion in this book, and i don't think i could (in good conscience) recommend it to anyone, but i don't regret finishing it.

[MJ Symmonds · Rating 2 out of 5]

First thank you to First Reads from which I won a copy of this book. When I read the synopsis for this book, I thought that it was right up my alley. I had a very hard time reading it. There was too much needless filler in it. When a subject or thought process started I just wanted to know the outcome. Most times you had to read a lot of other stuff that sometimes didn't relate to what was going on. I was intrigued enough to want to finish it since it was based on true events. For me personally I didn't understand the Military lingo & there is a lot. I just really wanted to know what happened between Tom and Amy. Did they have a big grand affair and even some of what went on with Tom in Afghanistan, just a little less. Could have easily been a short story.

[Gnarly Authenticity . · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent pseudo-fictional memoir of army life in the Gwot era, told in the good natured, stoical , rather touchingly naive voice of a hillbilly infantryman from oklahoma. The internet is a constant, unseen presence, intruding itself in tne form of red-pill banalities that are presented as the musings of the protagonist. There are the makings of an interesting character in the authorial stand-in: a Christian, boy scout type damaged by war and consumed with dark darwinian fantasies, but no daylight between character & author.

In the end, he seems pretty close to realizing that he has far more in common with his erstwhile taliban foes than with the countrymen he calls "the carpetbaggers".

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

I really enjoyed this book. It gives you a good look at what it's like to be a soldier in war, getting injured and then trying to get to some what a normal routine after getting back to the States. I had hoped for a happier ending to one of the situations in the book, but I guess with it being based on a true story not every book is going to have a happy ending. I would definitely recommend this book to others.

[Azriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was bitter, visceral, and pure in its humanity. A war novel concerned more with the interplay of moral, emotion, and the soldiers background and homelife and how it causes him to react to combat, rather than the politics or adventure of the war itself. A slice of reality that came very close to home.

[Rickie Hinrichs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in the Army in the early seventies. Young and new everything until real live ammo starting flying. Then as it says in the book there no atheists in a foxhole. What is our overall objective which no one seemed to know. When it's all said and done aren't we all strangers for it. Thanks goodreads for the free book.

[Kaitlyn Vaden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell into the book. Absolutely and totally. A definite must-read as I've told many. I won the book from good-reads and also got a note from the author which I love. I know a re-read is soon coming. :)

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book, but so many questions:

Why is it called “Breakfast with the dirt cult”? I don't think he ever explained.
Did he have an editor at all?
Why is the book, which is truly profound, also so relentlessly obscene?
Why is the narrative so choppy?
In spite of all that, I loved it.

[Sudharsan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

We've been here many times before: a young man joins the military in wartime in order to either find himself or fulfill some purpose; he meets a young woman from a different background who exerts a force on him that pulls him in another direction. Then we watch how things play out between these star-crossed, maybe ill-fated lovers who were entwined in each other's private universes for that one night in Honolulu or Paris or Milan or... Bobcaygeon. That the story's outline is familiar isn't necessarily a fault against such a book, since the devil is in the details.

"Breakfast with the Dirt Cult" succeeds in spite of itself, in those moments and passages where the author forgets his intention to make a point or editorialize, and where unfiltered emotion and candid descriptions of combat come to the fore.

Walton is a young soldier who has some time "in-theater" previously in Bosnia, and is now slated to go to Afghanistan. He's an "11 Bang-Bang," an infantryman in a unit that's a mix of hard-charging older men and young cherries who've never fired a shot outside of a marksmanship range.

The young soldier takes leave shortly before deploying, in Canada, and meets an exotic dancer at a gentleman's club, who, despite being on the clock, establishes an emotional and intellectual connection with Walton. The two enjoy some time together, promise to stay in touch and meet again, and then Walton is off to fight upon that sand-encrusted hemorrhoid that has vexed nations since time immemorial.

As previously alluded to, the sequences describing combat are stellar. At its best the book reminds me of a latterday version of James Jones's "The Thin Red Line," the way time seems to dilate or contract based upon what kind of epiphany a moment (or a bullet) is imparting to a young man who's been asking for a peak experience...and finally gets his wish, hard and long.

Anyone who's been in the military will recognize (and maybe even smile at) the banter, the coarsened and salty slang, the dirty jokes, and the weird sort of rough camaraderie that develops when men from wildly disparate backgrounds get thrown together, cheek-to-jowl, in a hellishly hot place that feels like it's a million miles from home.

The parts that bog the book down for me are the tirades and parenthetical asides that bring the proceedings to a halt, the neo-Spenglerian bemoaning of Western man's softening, the harangues about PC and the unfair and destructive power that feminist raunch/sex positive ideology hath wrought in the mating game. It isn't the ideology I object to (I'm not a mandarin or a commissar, so it's not my job to police people's speech or thought). But the soap-boxing disrupts the flow of the story, and in these moments the narrator (an obvious alter ego for the author) devolves from a stand-in to a cardboard cut-out. But as a first novel by a young writer, especially one brimming with so many enthusiasms, despair, and physical and psychic aches, it's an easy to overlook misstep in an otherwise solid book about war, men, and women. Recommended.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book via Michael Anton's review in the Fall 2021 CRB. That review concluded that the "disastrous" withdrawal from Afghanistan a few months earlier should not have surprised anyone who had read this 2012 book.

The book itself, self-published with no frills, comes through as an unfiltered dispatch from the distant (to me) world of the guys who actually fought the post-9/11 wars. The writing is intimate, moreso for the mediocre editing, and left me with great sympathy for the author/protagonist's perspective.

The protagonist joins the army thinking it's one of the last remaining ways to be a man. He finds that fighting in a war has much to recommend it, but is complicated by several factors. First, modern war always involves killing and maiming children. Second, there is no overall strategy, and the dubious plans of the foreign policy elite seem unworthy of strength and loyalty of the infantry. Relatedly, the country itself actively scorns masculinity and flyover states, while sending Okie men like the protagonist to do the dirty work of foreign wars. Finally, there aren't any nice girls to come home to, the women of his cohort having been chewed up by the emotional gauntlet of sexual liberation.

Woven through the text is a critique of the educational system that produces our elites. The protagonist dismisses "eggheads" and their "bullshit you had to have a lobotomy or a PhD to believe." Yet he peppers his reflections with references to Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Hobbes, Dostoyevsky, and Freud. Thus the infantryman who enjoys beer and Toby Keith has inherited as much or more of the intellectual heritage of Western civilization as the eggheads.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book for the most part. I found the parts describing Walton in Afghanistan to be fairly boring but I suppose that's how it was for the soldier as well. My favorite part and what I believe this book is mainly about is Walton's love affair with Amy. That's what I related to the most. Being madly in love, putting your foot in your mouth and then losing it all in the blink of an eye. One day you're thinking of marriage and children, the next she doesn't even want to see you. There is also commentary on the modern state of women and romance that I appreciated and related to. In some ways the author validated my feelings towards the modern day woman and made me feel less alone in my way of seeing things.
Even after a failed relationship, to still wish the person well and never really getting over the failure but somehow coming to terms with it and what it means as it pertains to your character as a man. To wallow in self pity is easier than becoming a stronger man. You may never win her back or undo your mistakes but you can learn from them and integrate the lessons. Maybe there will be someone who lights the same flame inside you once again. First, though, you need to dial it in and get your shit together. Stop making stupid decisions and start building yourself up or you'll be alone forever.

[Marcus Follin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A modern classic. Entertaining and insightful. The war in Afghanistan seen from the perspective of an American soldier. Recommended!

Memorable quote:

– “Yeah but if it was something she really wanted to do and felt like it would make her happy?
– As her father, I’d be a damn sight more concerned about her survival than her happiness. After all, this is war we’re talking about, Amy. People killin’ and dyin’. A girl marchin’ around in a beret and carrying a rifle, and getting fucked by PT studs is all fine and dandy till she gets blown the fuck up and her brains are paintin’ the road and her ovaries are scattered all over some Third World Shithole, or she gets captured and gang-raped in the dirt from hell-to-breakfast.”

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on war I've ever read. Finlay is the modern day Ernst Junger. What on the surface appears to be a memoir about a soldier's time in Afghanistan, and his complicated relationship with a Canadian ex-stripper, is really a deep insight into the philosophy of war, the intricacies of love in the modern world, and the psychology of the broken men and women that world has produced in the Millennial Generation. This is required reading for any man who would seek to rise above the decadence and absurdity that plagues American society, and longs for a world that makes a little more sense. Written in the eloquence and downright hilarious affability that only a son of the South could command, this page turner is well worth anyone's time and money.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not your typical heroic war memoir. Part narrative, part philosophical reflection on war, love and the state of western civilisation, Sam Finlay leans on his personal experiences in the US Army in both Bosnia and Afghanistan to tell a captivating story riddled with comedy, love and adrenaline fueled adventure. But it's not the war stories that made me love this book, it's Finlay's unapologetic reflection on the world he grew up in, loved and fought for, but ultimately became disillusioned with.

[natasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

so close to 5 stars but some parts towards the end didn’t resonate with me as strongly as the beginning. such a well written, hilarious and personal book. i love how realistic it felt and gave me a bigger insight into how infantrymen think and what the army does to your perception of the world. one of the best books i’ve read in a while. highly recommend if you’re interested in GWOT stuff or memoir-adjacent books.

[Chase Eyster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well worth reading. A good story told by an author who understands the subject matter and has a gift for writing with detail and nuance. Recommended with the hope that you will find it as insightful and interesting as I did.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

good in a sort of "good for your first novel" way (some of the themes feel a little undercooked and the author speaks directly to the reader a little too often).

Michael Anton's review is more thorough than mine: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/fu...

[Caleb Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Captivating, I read it in one sitting